I’ve located a merchant that has the perfect product line for my niche audience, but they recently discontinued their affiliate program with a major affiliate network, because they weren’t satisfied with the results. I spoke with the affiliate manager, and after seeing my site, they are interested in working with me. Is there an affiliate software you’d recommend that would allow the merchant to inexpensively set up their own affiliate program without going through one of the major networks?
There are tons of options out there. Personally, if I was going to set up an affiliate program today using software, I would one of two options: Groundbreak.com’s Ultimate Affiliate or iDevAffiliate.
Those are two of the most popular affiliate program software packages, and they have the tools you need for a bare bones affiliate program.
So, check those two out and I think either one should suffice.
However, if this company is thinking about scaling up to a big affiliate program, they might want to reconsider going straight back to one of the affiliate networks.
There are a variety of reasons why an affiliate program can fail, and I think them using their former affiliate network as a scapegoat might be convenient, but that doesn’t mean it’s correct.
It could have very well been their management of the affiliate program or a number of other issues.
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I would imagine they have multi-license versions, but I haven’t looked into it.
Is it possible to manage several shops with one version of these software? I am looking for an agency soloution for several clients?
As a typical consultant would say – “it depends”.
At the high end they could go with MyAffiliateProgram (MyAP) but there’s other more reasonable hosted options like AffPlanet and AffiliateTracking.net
If there’s some particular tracking or reporting features they liked then they should make sure whatever they go with has it. e.g. subid tracking, reporting by campaign, etc.
Hi Peter -
Which hosted software options would you recommend?
… or management of their affiliates.
You can’t rely on the “huge army of affiliates” in a network to do all the work.
Btw they could also consider hosted affiliate software if they don’t want to get into installing and maintaining the system itself.
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