Affiliates you can pay without arguing about attribution

You pay affiliates from a spreadsheet once a month. Some of it is guesswork, one of them queries every payout, and you have definitely paid commission on orders that were later refunded.

Affiliate marketing is attractive because you pay for outcomes rather than for impressions. It goes wrong in the administration: attribution you cannot evidence, commission paid on orders that come back, and a monthly reconciliation nobody enjoys.

All three are the same problem — the record of what was earned lives somewhere other than the record of what was sold.

Attribution you can show someone

An affiliate’s referral is recorded against the order it produced. When a payout is questioned — and it will be, because affiliates track their own numbers — the answer is a list of orders rather than a total you are asking them to trust.

This matters more than it sounds. The relationship is with people who have their own data and reasonable suspicion of yours, and being able to open the books ends the conversation in one message.

Commission that reflects the product

A flat percentage across a catalogue is easy to configure and frequently loses money. Twenty per cent on a high-margin accessory is generous; twenty per cent on a low-margin appliance can exceed the margin entirely, so the affiliate is paid more for the sale than you are.

So rates can be set per product as well as generally. Your best affiliates will push whatever pays best — which is a lever, not a problem, once the rates reflect what each product can afford.

Tiers, because affiliates are not equal

The one sending two orders a month and the one sending two hundred should not be on the same rate. Tiers make progression explicit, which turns a flat arrangement into something worth working at — an affiliate who can see the next tier has a reason to reach it.

Hold the payout until the return window closes

The most common way affiliate programmes leak money. Commission paid the week an order is placed is commission paid on orders that get refunded, and clawing it back afterwards is unpleasant and often futile.

Commission is held until the order is genuinely settled. Affiliates dislike waiting and accept it when the rule is stated up front; what they will not forgive is being paid and then chased.

A portal, so nobody has to ask you

Affiliates want to know what they have earned, what is pending and what has been paid. Answering that by email is a job that grows linearly with the number of affiliates, which is exactly backwards for something meant to scale.

They see their own orders, their own balance and their own payment history. It also makes them better at the job — an affiliate who can see which links convert will make more of those.

What this is not

This is a programme for affiliates you have a relationship with. It is not an affiliate network — it will not find partners for you, and it does not carry the cross-merchant tracking or fraud detection that a network provides. If you need thousands of unvetted affiliates, use a network. If you have twenty people who genuinely sell for you, this is better, cheaper and yours.