The Home Depot Affiliate Program Review

The Home Depot affiliate program gives you an opportunity to promote thousands of Home Depot products available on their online store.

The Home Depot is, with its 2300 stores, the world’s biggest home-improvement retailer.

The majority of stores are located in the USA and its territories, but the Home Depot also operates in Canada and Mexico.

This review will cover everything for the US Home Depot affiliate program. The Canadian affiliate program is only slightly different and there is no affiliate program for Mexico.

Home Depot Affiliate Program

The Home Depo affiliate program can be joined on Impact Radius. If you already have an Impact Radius account, you can find the program on the Impact Radius platform and join it from there.

The only requirement to join the program is to have a website. The Home Depot states that they are open to many types of websites but preferably you want to have a website somehow related to home improvement.

The referral period is only 24 hours and it works on the last-click attribution model. This means that if someone clicks on your affiliate link and does not buy and then makes a purchase through someone else’s affiliate link, you will not receive the commission.

You will be provided with a banner of various sizes and with text links. The program does allow deep linking so you can create a link to any product page you want.

What Can Home Depot Affiliates Promote?

The Home Depot does not limit its affiliate program to certain categories. Any product you find on their online store can earn you a commission.

The products are divided into 17 different categories. Each category is then divided into many subcategories so there are really a lot of home improvement products to choose from.

The Home Depot claims that each of their bricks and mortar stores has around 40,000 products. As a Home Depot affiliate who promotes products only from their online store, you can promote more than 200,000 products.

That’s quite a lot. If you want to promote specific products related to home improvement, you will surely find them on the Home Depot online store.

However, not all Home Depot products have the potential for earning you a significant amount on commissions. You must select products strategically, but more about that later.

Now let’s take a look at the program’s commission.

Home Depot Affiliate Program Commission

The Home Depot has a 2% commission and for selected home décor products a higher 8% commission.

The Home Depot FAQs for the affiliate program says that the commission is 3%, but from the program application, you discover that the commission is only 2%.

Affiliates are not eligible to earn commission on all Home Depot gift cards, custom created products, and in-store purchases.

Gift cards

If someone makes a purchase with a voucher, you will not earn anything.

Installation services

The Home Depot customers can, for many products, pay extra for installation services. Sadly, your commission is always calculated from just the product price and it is not raised by extra services.

Custom created products

If a product is not listed on the Home Depot online store, it’s not eligible for commission.

In-store purchases

This one is obvious. If someone clicks on your affiliate link and decides to buy from a bricks and mortar store instead of the online store, you will not earn any commission. It’s impossible to track the referral when the purchase does not happen online.

However, you earn a commission if someone makes a purchase online and then goes to the store to pick it up. If the customer buys online and not in store, you are always eligible for commission.

Since the Home Depot affiliate program is hosted on the Impact Radius platform, you can withdraw your money via a number of payment methods including PayPal, check, wire transfer and direct deposit.

The minimum payout via checks is $100 and for direct deposits $50.

Can You Make $1000 a Month as a Home Depot Affiliate?

Is it possible? Absolutely, but the question is: how hard will it be?

Let’s choose a product from a home décor category with the highest 8% commission.

Home Depot products that fall into the home décor category are, in general, the cheaper products – wall décor, clocks, pillows, mats etc. However, if you go through the home décor subcategories, you will be able to find some more expensive products for which you can get higher commission.

In this example, let’s go with this decorative wall shelf which sells for $195.

Remember that promoting pricey products earns you more on commission but in general you sell fewer products. More expensive products always have lower conversion rates. Often, affiliates have better results promoting products under $100. They earn less on commission, but they manage to sell more products, so the small commissions add up.

It is always a matter of testing. Anyway, in this example we go with this more expensive product.

The product costs $195 so with 8% commission you would approximately earn $16.

To earn $1000 with this one product, you need to generate 63 sales.

Usually, in my affiliate reviews I use a 2% conversion rate, but this time I will be more pessimistic and say that the conversion rate is only 1%. Given the higher price of this product, 1% is actually quite a realistic estimate.

In order to generate 63 sales a month with a 1% conversion rate, your content with your affiliate links would need to be seen by 6300 people a month.

Is that achievable? Yes, a figure of 6300 website visitors is not that much. If you don’t know how to target low competition keywords and build website authority, you can achieve that in less than a year.

How to Make Money with the Program

If you decide to join the Home Depot affiliate program, it is very important that you take the time to choose the right products to promote.

What do I mean by the right products?

I mean products that you don’t need to see or try in a store prior to buying.

You only earn commissions on purchases that happen on the Home Depot online store. You don’t want to convince people to buy a certain product but first go to the store and try it.

For instance, patio chairs would not be great products to promote. Some people would want to try the chairs prior to buying to make sure that they are comfortable.

Also, the right product needs to have keywords with decent search volume and not a lot of competition. If you have a new website and target a competitive keyword, you are doomed to failure as your post has little chance of ranking high in the search results.

Okay, now you know how to choose the right products, let’s take a look at how you can approach promoting.

You need to have a website and preferably some know how around home improvements and décor.

If you want to have the higher 8% commission, you must promote products from the home décor category.

What kind of products you promote should reflect on your promotional strategy.

When people want to buy home décor products, they usually don’t know what exactly they want to buy. They want to decorate their home with something nice, but they don’t usually have a specific product in mind.

That means that there is no point in optimizing your content for keywords related to a specific product. Instead, you should target more general keywords. You should target keywords that people search for when they need to get inspired.

In our example, for the decorative wall shelf product, you could write content called ‘’Top Wall Shelf Ideas for Living Room‘’.

Inspirational posts like this one do very well on Pinterest so you could definitely leverage that.

The Home Depot affiliate program does not allow you to send traffic directly to the product listing, but that’s okay. It’s better to send the people from Pinterest to a post on your website where you list and review multiple different products. If the visitors have options, there is a bigger chance that some products will catch their attention and that they will click on your affiliate link.

What Are the Home Depot Affiliate Program Alternatives?

How does the Home Depot affiliate program compare to similar programs?

Amazon Associates

The first alternative that comes to mind is obviously Amazon Associates.

Amazon Associates has 8% commission for the home improvement category, which is lot higher than the 2% that the Home Depot has. The Home Depot has 8% commission only for home décor products.

Both programs have a short 24-hour referral period.

Even though the Home Depot specializes in home improvement, I don’t think that it offers more products than Amazon. If there is a product you want to promote and you can find it both on Amazon and the Home Depot, it’s better if you go with Amazon.

Walmart

Walmart is another retailer that does not specialize in home improvement but still has a great selection of products.

I have written a detailed review of the Walmart affiliate program so you can check it out.

Walmart has 4% commission for the home category and a little longer 3-day referral period.

Wayfair

Wayfair specializes in home furnishings and décor items.

Wayfair has a 7-day referral period and 7% commission on all products.

In my opinion, if you want to promote home furnishing or décor items then the Wayfair affiliate program is a great choice.

It’s a specialized store just like the Home Depot, but unlike the Home Depot it has a 7-day referral period and 7% commission on all products.

Should You Join the Home Depot Affiliate Program?

The Hope Depot is a big and established brand and for many Americans the only store to go to when in need of home improvement products.

However, their affiliate program is not the best choice given both the low commission rate and the short referral period.

If you are not planning on promoting specifically home décor products, which have an 8% commission rate, then I would not even test the program as you will be always better off with the alternatives mentioned above.

The affiliate programs should not be selected just based upon the commissions. You can earn more money with an affiliate program that has 2% than with an affiliate program that has 8%.

It’s all a game of numbers. To earn the same amount with 2% as opposed to 8%, you need to make more sales and/or have a bigger conversion rate.

I have just recently written an article for dating affiliate programs. Some of the programs offer high commission, yet affiliates earn less than with programs that offer lower commission. This is because some of the dating sites are not that established and people would rather register on a dating site they are familiar with.

So, some dating affiliate programs have lower commission but much higher conversion rates.

However, I don’t think that your conversation rate will differ much whether you promote The Home Depot, Amazon Associates or Wayfair. All these brands are established, trusted, and the products in the home improvement category are not that different.

Hopefully, you understand what I am trying to say.

To sum it up, test the Home Depot program if you want to promote just home décor products. If you want to promote other categories, go with some of the alternatives mentioned above.