Target
Target is a US general merchandise retailer with roughly two thousand stores and a large online catalogue.
What it is
Target is a US general merchandise retailer with roughly two thousand stores and a large online catalogue. Its affiliate program, branded Target Partners, covers over a million products across target.com and selected Target apps. It is built for US-facing content sites and creators.
The deal
The headline rate is the top of a category ladder rather than a flat rate, and Target does not publish the ladder anywhere reachable — the rate card sits behind the network and in your individual insertion order, and the URL the terms point to for standard rates no longer resolves. Assume the top rate covers a narrow slice of categories and that some are excluded entirely. The genuinely strong term here is the cookie behaviour: within the window you earn on the whole basket, not just the item you linked, and on every order that customer places, not only their first. Attribution is last click, so another affiliate’s link or a Target marketing email landing in between takes the sale off you.
Getting paid
Tracking and payment both run through Impact. Target’s terms default to a monthly cycle unless your individual contract says otherwise, and a W-9 has to be on file before anything is released. Returns are deducted from the following month’s payment, and Target reserves the right to hold payment until two months after the refund window closes, so cash can sit for a while on returnable categories. There is no published minimum balance — that is Impact’s setting.
The rules
Your site has to be family-friendly, e-commerce focused and aimed mainly at a US audience, though you can be based anywhere Impact supports. Brand bidding is out entirely: no Target brand terms, variations or misspellings in paid search or content networks, and none in ad headlines, display URLs or descriptions. You cannot direct-link affiliate URLs from paid ads, use the product datafeed on any site other than the one approved, pass that feed to other marketplaces, or post affiliate links on Target’s own social accounts. SEO tactics that rank your pages for Target brand terms are prohibited too. FTC disclosure is mandatory on every page and post, with prescribed wording and hashtags. Target employees, their families, and Target’s suppliers and agencies cannot participate.