How to start with your affiliate program

Hi, thank you for choosing Affiliatly.
On this blog post you will find how to start with your affiliate program and setup it.

First, the integration of Affiliatly with your store
Depending of your framework, the integration can be:

  • completed, if you are using Shopify
  • 1/2 completed, if you are using BigCommerce, please check your Integration page in your Admin panel how to complete it.
  • not completed for all other frameworks, please check your Integration page in your Admin panel

1. Test the integration by using the test affiliate, this is an affiliate inserted by us, so that you can test the integration (visits tracking and purchase tracking) and see the affiliate’s panel. The credentials for the affiliate panel are:
email: test@test.com
password: 123456

The visit and the referred purchase should be visible immediately in your admin panel (or with maximum delay of up to 5 minutes). If they are not, please contact us describing the problem and giving us your account ID (AF-10XXX) so we can check the integration.

Notice: After making a successful test of the integration, be sure to add your IP address and/or email (if you are using the same email for your purchases) in the “Block certain user IP addresses” and/or “Block client’s emails” options in the Settings page. When you do this, the app will not track any purchases made by you or your staff.

2. After completing the integration, your affiliate program is now tracking visits and referred purchases. All you need to do is check the Settings and make the appropriate changes suiting your tastes.
3. Go to page Settings in your admin panel, the most important options are:
Methods for tracking affiliated users: how do you wish to track visits and sales, by default only the Link tracking is turned on.
Default Cookie Duration: only valid if you are using link tracking, it tells how much days the tracking cookie will be active i.e. for how long will the referred visitor be tracked and his purchases be associated with the affiliate
Mark Earnings: how are the earnings going to be calculated, as percent from the total sum of the purchase, a flat rate for each purchase not depending of the price or per client’s visit
Default Affiliate Percent: if you choose percent per purchase, here you can set the default commission percentage
Amount per purchase: if you have chosen Flat rate per purchase, then here you can set the flat amount that will be given to the affiliate for each referred purchase.

For the other options, you can check
http://www.affiliatly.com/faq.html?id=6
the whole FAQ page:
http://www.affiliatly.com/faq.html
You can also check and our video tutorials here:
Video Tutorials

You can also check the FAQ that is specifically for your installation, by clicking on the blue info icon at the right of your admin panel.

84 thoughts on “How to start with your affiliate program

    • Hi Mariah, there is no problem helping you with the setup of your affiliate program, but support is via email only. Please send an email to the support email, explaining what exactly do you need help with and we will help.

  1. I am having issues getting the test link to work. I’ve inserted the script into the footer, but when I try the test link it tells me there were “too many redirects” and the page cannot be opened. How do I fix this issue?

    Thanks!
    Katelin

    • Hi Zacharie, register an Affiliatly account choosing CrateJoy as your framework and then when you are in your panel, check the Integration page. In there you will see tutorial how to integrate.

  2. i just finished setting up my affiliately apps and i have 1 registered affiliate, question 1. having my first affiliate, what is the procedure if he wants to share/post my products to facebook, instagram, twitter etc? can i monitor his activities his postings /sharings? if someone buy his product shared or posted, can he monitor it? and what is the use of link generator? thank you

    • Your affiliates can find their personal link or coupon code in the Info page of their panel and can share their links the way they normally would share any link on social media. For Instagram it is best to use coupon code, since there cannot be links in the descriptions of posts.

      When the link is clicked, the visit and subsequent sale (if there is one) are recorded in the Affiliatly database and you can see this info in your panel (tabs Affiliates and Orders). It is much the same with coupon codes – when the code is used, you will see the referred order in the Orders tab and a commission will be calculated for the affiliate. You can also view aggregated info about the visits and orders on the Dashboard tab. Your affiliates can also see the visits and orders associated with them in their panels.

      The link generator’s purpose is for your affiliates to be able to easily create a link to a specific product page, for example. They should copy and paste the URL in the generator and when they click the “Generate” button, they will receive their personal tracking link for it, which includes their tracking parameter.

    • Hi Pierre, by default the links are no-follow, but the affiliate program administrator can uncheck that option in their Settings page. Also keep in mind that the affiliates can always edit the links they are sharing and make the no-follow or do-follow.

    • The links of your affiliates are based on the URL specified in the field “Your site address” in Settings > General. To change them to the https version, just enter the URL of your store with “https://” before the domain name and save the changes. Note that you need to notify your affiliates who have already shared their links that you want them to use the https links, which they can find in their panels.

    • Hi,
      you first need to register your account with us and when you are asked for framework, choose “Squarespace”. After you are done, login into your Affiliatly’s admin panel and check page “Integration”. In there you will find info how to integrate the affiliate program with your store.

  3. Hi! I have a question on setting up thank you page tracking using Affiliatly. Can you email me please so I can give you the details on how we are using this app on our Shopify store? Thank you!

  4. Is there an option to require a membership fee to become an affiliate with my company? Aside from having a product purchase option with manual activation, can I instead set up a cost to join?

  5. I’m wanting to set up an affiliate link in my e-book (refer readers to another business). Can I use this site to do that?

    • Hi Selena, yes you can do that. But the business to which you wish to link, must have an account with us and have our tracking codes installed for their site.

  6. Is there a way to choose only specific products from within my catalog for affiliates to earn commission from? I have hundreds of products available, but only want affiliates to be promoting and earning from a select few. Please help.

  7. Hi there,
    I want to have affiliates or re-sellers selling my products. Some re-sellers will not have websites. My website is hosted in BigCommerce? I want my resellers to have brochures with a Coupon Code unique to the re-seller they can leave with a customer, when the customer goes to our website and places an order with the coupon code the sale is allocated to the re-seller. Can this be done???
    Thanks

    Ken

    • Hi Ken,

      Yes, you can use coupon code tracking with BigCommerce. First, you need to create the coupon codes in your store and then you have to associate them with your affiliates in Affiliatly. Here we have a video tutorial which will help you with the setup: https://youtu.be/wewITNJqgUI.

      When a customer uses an affiliate’s coupon code at checkout, they will receive the discount you have set for the coupon code in your store and the affiliate will receive a commission for the sale (on the price minus the discount).

    • Hi Monica, sadly you can not import your affiliates in bulk from your panel. But if you send me a CSV file with your affiliates data (name and email are required), I will import them for you.

  8. On our shopify website at the bottom we added the option to click on Affiliate Program, when people click on Affiliate program is there a page that gives someone Login info to sign up to be an affiliate? I just need help integrating everything. Thanks

  9. hi, I have people signing up to be affiliates. I have created a code for them although when I type the code in my shopify store at check out it says it is not available. how do I intergrate this with my shopify store so that the code is valid?

  10. I need this to be integrated into my website you pay on my website with paypal. I am not receiving any help what soever from customer service. It simply isnt working I have 16 affiliates sitting waiting for do this.

    • Hi Angela,
      yes we have such feature, is called Two tier.
      Our feature Two Tier allows your affiliates to recruit others and receive a commission for their sales. You can enable it from Settings > General > “Two Tier settings”. Your affiliates will receive their personal link to promote your affiliate program (it will lead to the login page and will look something like this: https://www.affiliatly.com/af-10XXXX/affiliate.panel?ref=123, where 10XXXX is replaced with your actual Affiliatly account ID), which they can find in the Info page of their panels. When an affiliate who signed up from their link refers a sale, the first affiliate will also receive a commission for it (which you can specify in “Two Tier settings”).

      You can also manually associate referred affiliates from the Affiliates page. Click the cogwheel in the table to open the details window and go to the Two Tier tab. Enter the email or the ID of the affiliate you want to associate and click the “Associate” button.

      Does it show them as being on their team?
      – yes, the referring affiliates will see page “Two tier” in their affiliate panels, where they can see the affiliates which they have referred.

      You can read more about this feature here: https://www.affiliatly.com/faq.html?id=16.

  11. Are you still not able to integrate with Godaddy stores????????????????????? i reall y need help here. i have done everything and still nothing and now i have seen you respond with not able to integrate with Godaddy, i hope that has since been fixed?

    • Hi Jason, an integration with GoDaddy is not possible, because they are not allowing for a 3rd party to get the order ID and price. An integration is not possible with them, because of their closed system.

    • Hi Anton,

      Yes, you can have the login and registration pages, as well as the affiliate panel, on your own subdomain. It is called white labeling.

      First you need to create the subdomain you wish to use (affiliates.your-site.com for example) for your domain and add a DNS entry type “A” (for that subdomain) pointing to 164.138.220.214 (which is our server). When you are done, please tell me and I will make the configuration from our side and then do the switch.

      Note that when your affiliates log in to their panels, the URL will change to affiliates.your-site.com/af-10XXXX/affiliate.panel, where XXXX is your Affiliatly ID.

      Also note that even if you have an SSL certificate for your website, it will not work for this subdomain, and if you want the page to show as secure to the visitors, you will need to purchase a separate certificate for the subdomain (the price is $16 per year).

  12. Hi team,

    I wanna know that could we set up the expiry date for each affiliates? Let say 1 year, 3 years and 5 years. Thanks.

  13. Hey guys,
    I have built our website in Webflow and integrated a Shopify Buy Button into it. I have tried setting up Affiliatly with our store and also placing a cookie tracking code in the site’s footer. However, after trying several test purchases, I still haven’t been able to get it working. Do you have any suggestions?

    Thanks,
    Austin

    • We can integrate with the Shopify buy button. Please reach out to our support and provide those test order numbers so we can check the back end.

  14. Hi, can you help me understand this better? I would like to have ads/banners for my site on some other websites that work with affiliatly.com. However, I do not want to show any other company’s ads on my website. Is that possible? Or do I have to advertise other products?

    Also, Can I sign up and select (contact them and ask) the websites on which I would like my ads displayed? Or is that chosen at random?

    Thanks!

    • Hi Linn,

      You would need to register for an account with us and start promoting your account so affiliates will sign up.

    • Hi Michele, It will depend on if you are able to add our visitor tracking code to the footer and our order tracking code to the thank you page. Please reach out to our support via our website to go over in more detail.

    • You would register directly for Woocommerce integration through Affiliatly.com. Once registered, you will receive the steps to integrating with Woocommerce.

    • There could be a few reasons why the affiliate is showing a negative balance. Please reach out to our support with your issue and we can look into your account in detail.

  15. Hi, I have problems with tracking my purchases. I wanted to test my integration. I opened the link in the incognito mode and I can see that tracking visitors works well. Then I made a test purchase but unfortunately it doesn’t show up in the panel. The number of order is zero. Maybe I’ve made some mistake while adding the code on my Thank you-page. I chose for JavaScript and added the code from the Integration page. I replaced ‘order’ and ‘price’ with data valid for my SaaS solution (Shoper), namely {order_id}, {float_sum} and {discount_code} for the coupon code. But something went wrong. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I did not remove the ## from the code (like in this verse var affi_id_order = ‚##{order_id}##’;) and it should have been removed. I don’t know what’s wrong. Could you please help me?

  16. I do not understand this at all and what it has to do with selling or making commission on sugar shower

    • On your dashboard you can check the info tab and it will give you the link you will need to use to provide to potential customers for Sugar shower. Each time your link is used and an order placed, you will earn a commission.

  17. Hello, I have a Squarespace site that uses Acuity Scheduling which is where my transactions are. Can Affiliatly track my bookings based on the coupon code they use to schedule their appointments so referrals earn a commission? Please advise.

    • Hi Lydia, Unfortunately, we would not be able to integrate with your setup. We are not able to track coupon codes on Squarespace or bookings created using Acuity.

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