PARROT Drones Deactivates Affiliate Program

If you’re selling anything online today, chances are you have an affiliate program.  Amazon, DJI, BestBuy…you name it, they all have an affiliate program.  Affliliate programs pay ‘affiliates’ (people who promote their products) a commission for promoting their products.  But over the weekend we learned that French drone-maker Parrot has deactivated their affiliate program with FlexOffers.

FlexOffers is a 3rd party affiliate management company, that handles an affiliate program for companies that don’t want to set one up in house.

The FlexOffers is one of the larger affiliate programs offering online marketers the opportunity to promote everythign from DirecTV to Ugly Christmas Sweaters.

The Parrot affiliate program deactivation could mean one of two things.  First, it’s possible that Parrot has decided to take it’s affiliate program in house as a cost saving measure.   The second reason could be that Parrot is experiencing declining sales and is deactivating the affiliate program as a short term action to shore up the finances.

It can’t be easy being Parrot.  The drone space is completely dominated by DJI, despite the fact that the recently released Parrot ANAFI 4K drone is an excellent product.  The world is just beating a path to DJI’s door.

Parrot reports their 4th Quarter 2018 earnings next month, and it’s not unusual for a company to be making adjustments ahead of a release and subsequent conference call.

Affiliate programs are highly consumer oriented in nature.  If Parrot’s consumer sales are flagging this could be a sign that the company is deciding to put more focus on commercial drone opportunities.

We’ll keep an eye on this evolving story to see which way it’s trending.