Ecommerce Affiliate Marketing | Use Affiliate Marketing for Big Ecommerce Profits

Affiliate Marketing.

Affiliate Marketing is a simple concept. You offer affiliates the opportunity to promote your products online, and they earn a set commission for every customer they send to your website who buys from you. The sale must be completed in order to register as an affiliate sale. This can be a percentage or set amount of the sale value.

The affiliate’s sales are all tracked using affiliate software that assigns a unique code to every individual affiliate who signs up to promote your affiliate program. You (the merchant) are also assigned a unique code that you install—hidden in the code—on your order confirmation page.

To register an affiliate sale, a customer will click from the affiliate’s website or advert and their unique code will be assigned to this customer’s path via cookies and tracked through to the checkout confirmation page on your merchant website, where the affiliate’s code meets with your merchant code and a sale is completed.

Think of an affiliate as being an independent sales rep. They do not get a salary; they simply make commissions on any sales they send you.
Pros: The pros to this are that you can get an army of affiliates/websites promoting your products, potentially generating many incoming links ‘back links’ that we know are essential for Off-Site SEO.

Cons: The cons are that you may get lots of competitors and competing sites that can affect your dominance and profits if you pay the affiliates too well.

It is important to Run the Numbers to Ensure there is Enough profit for You to:

a) Pay the affiliates their commission
b) Pay the affiliate network (if you use an affiliate network company to handle your account, etc)
c) Take some money yourself from each sale.

You can choose to stipulate various conditions in your affiliate terms such as ‘affiliates must not use PPC ads to promote your affiliate program.’ You would enforce this if you want to dominate the PPC space for your product. You can also determine the cookie length that is assigned to a prospect’s tracking and registering as an affiliate sale, meaning they have a limited time to place the order once they have clicked your affiliate’s link to your website. The average cookie length is 30 days.

The Flexibility of the Program Depends on Whether You Use your Own Software, or Go through a Recognized Affiliate Network such as: