MichaelNZ:

 

michaelmurfy:

 

What I am saying is running an ISP is a low-margin business so commission payouts are pretty minimal and there is no ISP that is right for 100% of customers. There are providers like Voyager, Spark, HD.net and Solarix that offer reseller agreements however what I and others in this thread doing a recommendation on an ISP based on the customers needs is better than recommending just one provider hence why it is a good idea to have multiple reseller agreements with different ISP's or a major ISP like Spark where you can offer it to them.

 

I can tell you now you won't get much more than $20 per connection, hence why the BigPipe one (if you used BigPipe at home or switched to them) was actually both a simple and good option.

 

 

That's what ISP's claim, but when one considers the sort of metrics customer lists are sold for, I am appropriately skeptical.

 

 

 

such as?

 If you are talking about when ISPs get purchased and people talk about how they are worth "$xxx per customer" (e.g. Snap, Orcon x 4 in the last few years, Whoosh, WxC) that's not really relevant at all.  For one thing, those customers are already up and running on the network. No other costs are required to get them started and they will start delivering margin immediately to the purchasing ISP.  They are a known quantity, many of the customers have been with that ISP for years and won't switch away.

Whereas if you are referring a new customer to an ISP, the ISP still has plenty of other costs to incur before they start making money off that customer - such as:

Chorus connection fees,

the cost of modem,

the offer to the customer to get them to sign up (e.g. first month free or something like $100 credit is not uncommon as an acquisiton offer).

Also the first week or two is when things are most likely to go wrong,  so add on some other costs for the extra support required for most people.

And since the customer is new, they could easily leave before the ISP even makes any money at all from them.

so maybe if you negotiated to remove some of those issues from the ISP's plate, they might be more willing to pay more for referral  (e.g. you could say that these customers don't need a special deal to sign up with, your recommendation is good enough, so the ISP can pay you the $100 instead of giving the customer $100 credit as a sign-up perk)