I run a small affiliate site from China. Five programs in one Saturday afternoon: one working, one declined, one emailed, two dropped.
I run proteinpayment.com from China. It is a Hugo static-export site with 50+ articles about paying for whey, mass gainer, and protein boxes across India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico. Cloudflare Pages hosts it, D1 backs the newsletter form, Resend sends the welcome email. The boring plumbing part of an Amazon affiliate site.
I spent Saturday afternoon applying to four more affiliate programs — LazyPay, Simpl, MyProtein, HealthKart — plus Impact.com, which I already had an account on. Here is what actually happened, all five in one day.
Amazon Associates: working since 2024
Nothing to report here. The boring fact is: this is the only program I have been paid through, and the only one that did not ask me where I live. Amazon Associates does not care if you are in Bangalore or Beijing. That alone made it the longest survivor in my stack.
Impact.com: marketplace declined, account still active
I applied to Impact.com to reach MyProtein and HealthKart via their catalog. Created the publisher account, accepted the Master Publisher Service Agreement, walked through every profile question. Two hours later I got a "marketplace application declined" notice.
The second line of that notice is the interesting one: "This does not affect any of your existing or pending brand program relationships. Your impact.com account can continue to be used when partnering directly with brands via their unique sign-up links and when accepting invitations to brand programs."
A polite way of saying: marketplace auto-reject is per-brand; the account itself is fine.
So I read the Master Publisher Service Agreement at app.impact.com. Zero hits for "China", "Chinese", "OFAC", or "sanctioned" anywhere in the agreement. The block is per-brand, not contractual. Section 3.1 mentions an Account Management Fees path applied "when Impact.com is unable to verify the information and/or documents submitted by Partner" — which matches a non-US bank / non-SSN KYC failure cleanly.
So Impact is not the destination. It is a tool for direct brand invites, which I have not yet triggered.
LazyPay: applied by email, awaiting response
LazyPay's footer shows "Partners" — but it is merchant partners, food and e-commerce brands. Clicking through gives a 403 on every URL variant I tried, including with a VPN node in Mumbai.
There is no public affiliate signup page. The path is email outreach only.
I sent to wecare@lazypay.in. Sent from my personal Gmail because the domain email yanxi002studio@proteinpayment.com is set up as receive-only via Cloudflare Email Routing — it has no SMTP, so I cannot send "as" it. Reply-To was not set; the lazy fallback was personal Gmail.
If LazyPay replies with a KYC path that needs an Indian phone, that will be the next place I find out whether India-resident KYC has any China alternative.
Simpl: dropped
The real "what" of this one: getsimpl.com is a Namecheap parking page. Not the company. Their main domain appears to be simpl.com (and / or getsimpl.in for the Indian variant), but none of those URLs led to an affiliate signup when I tried them either. Dropped from P2.
The lesson: when a domain returns a hosted-by-Namecheap placeholder, do not dig deeper. Walk away.
MyProtein: on hold
Was the original reason I signed up for Impact.com. The catalog refused my marketplace application, so the workaround path is direct outreach to affiliates@myprotein.com asking them to issue an Impact partnership from their side.
I decided not to send that email today. Marketplace auto-reject is a routine outcome, not a hard fail; waiting to see what LazyPay comes back with is a better use of attention than firing off a parallel email that probably will not matter.
HealthKart: dropped
HealthKart does have an affiliate program. The "Refer & Earn" link in their footer takes you to a login / signup page. The signup page asks for a 10-digit mobile number with a +91 country code and an OTP. There is no fallback.
Three things I learned in one afternoon
One. Indian BNPL and supplement affiliate programs have systemic China-resident friction. Of the four non-Amazon options I tried, three either required an Indian phone, parked their brand domain, or operated auto-reject for China-resident publisher accounts through brand-side geo rules. Only LazyPay gave me a real email-able contact.
Two. Service agreements tell you more than rejection emails do. A 30-second grep of the MPSA saved me an afternoon of speculative work. Reading terms is unfashionable; reading them when you are blocked is the highest-leverage thing you can do next.
Three. Document dead ends as well as successes. I updated AFFILIATE-APPLICATION-GUIDE.md to record everything I learned today: the actual signup URL variants I tested, the actual domain that was a placeholder, the actual signup page that wanted an Indian number. The next time I open that file, those four hours of trial and error are not lost.
Outlook
I will hear back from LazyPay in one to four weeks, if at all. If they come back with a real path I will run it; if not, I will add two words to this post — "and got nothing" — and call P2 a structural dead end rather than keep grinding.
The thing I keep coming back to is that LazyPay / Simpl / HealthKart are not the business. Amazon Associates is. The reason to keep trying the others is upside, not foundation. Knowing where to stop trying is, in a small way, also part of building.
You can ship a similar small affiliate site from anywhere in the world if Amazon is your monetization. Where you live starts to matter the moment you try to add a second program.
Tim Yx runs proteinpayment.com, an English-language affiliate site covering BNPL, EMI, and other payment methods for protein supplement buyers across India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico.
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