Affiliate marketing programs
Affiliate marketing is a reward-based system that encourages partners (affiliates) to promote your products in exchange for a commission.
To run an affiliate campaign, you find an entrepreneur, influencer, or content creator willing to sign up for your affiliate program and send visitors to your store through their special referral link. Any sales that you make as a result of their promotion earns the marketer a reward. As a result, you increase traffic to your store, and the affiliate marketer gets paid.
There are two ways for affiliates to promote your brand: share a link to your store or add your entire Ecwid store to their website. In both scenarios, a third-party website is just an additional sales channel for your store. All new orders will appear in your Ecwid admin. To distinguish the order source, you need to use affiliate links with unique IDs for each affiliate campaign.
Sharing links to your store on the affiliate's website
The most common way to work with affiliates is to find business partners that will share links to your store or add banners to their site that redirect people to your online shop. It can be not just a link, but a review on your product or story about their experience with your brand. For example, many YouTube videos have brand integrations in which content creators share their user experience with a particular product.
To track how many visitors each partner brings to your store, you need to create a special affiliate link for each affiliate campaign. That way, you can measure how effective your affiliate campaign is. You can find dozens of services and platforms that can help you create an affiliate link. Usually, these apps provide a dashboard where you can see your affiliates, how many customers or sales they bring you, calculate referral commissions, etc. Affiliate partners can also track their success from their end.
There are several apps in the Ecwid App Market that will help you to run an affiliate program:
- Post Affiliate Pro: Affiliate Tracking
- LeadDyno: Easy Affiliate Marketing
- Affiliatly: Affiliate Marketing Software
- iDevAffiliate: Affiliate Tracking Software
- Omnistar: Affiliate Marketing Software
To set up an affiliate app, you’ll most likely need to add a conversion/affiliate tracking code to the page that customers see after placing an order.
Alternatively, you can create links with the UTM tags. UTM tags allow you to track the source of your orders right from your Ecwid admin.
Embedding your whole store or particular products to the affiliate's website
Since you can embed your Ecwid store to as many websites as you want, you can ask your affiliate partners to add your store or a single product to their websites.
To sell directly on your affiliate’s website:
- Provide your affiliate partner with the Ecwid store integration code or a Buy Button link (to place a single product) with a special ID to identify where an order came from.
- Ask your partner to place the code on their website.
- Track orders placed through that website.
To track which website the order came from, you will have to add a special ID to the integration code. Referred orders will be marked with this ID in your Ecwid admin, so in your admin you will see where an order came from. You can export all the orders to clearly see how many customers each affiliate brings you and calculate their commission.
Alternatively, you can track sales on affiliates’ websites automatically with a third-party service. In that case, the affiliate ID generated by the third-party service should be added to the source code of the affiliate’s website along with your store integration code. For example, you can generate a unique ID with Post Affiliate Pro.
Related articles