Ask HN: Setting up an affiliate program? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Setting up an affiliate program?

4 pointsMicahWedemeyer3 comments

I'm spinning up a marketplace site for plants (http://doleaf.com), and we'd like to offer an affiliate program.

We had it on our long-term roadmap, but recently found a site that's such a perfect fit that we want to bump it up and push out a basic program now. The owners of the other site are eager to integrate our listings, so we want to get moving quickly.

What's a good way to go about setting this up? We want to offer a % of the sale price, but don't want to deal with sending checks, managing analytics, or anything like that. Is there a 3rd party service that will handle all that stuff? I'm imagining some kind of service that handles redirecting to us, keeping track of who sent us the traffic, and sends the check. In return, we just get a monthly bill with the affiliate fees.

Anyways, I'd love any sort of advice on setting this up.

Sounds like you want an affiliate network rather than setting it up inhouse. These networks handle all the tracking, invoicing, etc and just send you a bill (well usually they ask for a deposit up front).

CJ mentioned above is the biggest but they tend to have restrictions like minimum traffic, sales, etc. Depending on where your traffic is, you can also try Clickbank, Clixgalore, Pepperjam, Zanox, to name a few.

Tip 1: be very sure how much each sale is worth to you, taking into account refunds, cost of sales, operations, etc. You don't want to be paying out more than your margin...

Tip 2: watch your cashflow. You don't want to pay out before you collect from your customers.

Good luck!

There are affiliate program code bases for sale, they're pretty dependent on your platform though so make sure you take a good look at what it takes to get them up and running before you order something.

Third party is possible but not a requirement, though it does have the added benefit of having 'hands off' reporting, which increases the trust factor with your affiliates.

You might want to checkout out services like commission junction (http://www.cj.com/) that focus on this sort of thing. Never used any of them from the seller side though.

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