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Home > E-Commerce Website Development > Marketing > Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a form of performance based reward marketing, where third party website owners (affiliates or publishers) will drive traffic and sales to your website, in return for a reward or commission.

It can be a very cost effective way of marketing your own website, products or services, as generally you only pay for sales or qualified leads. Sometimes this is referred to as "Cost Per Action" (CPA) as you only pay commissions when you get the results that you desire - usuaully a confirmed order. As you can see this can have many advantages over traditional forms of advertising as you only pay on results.

We have extensive experience of promoting e-commerce websites using the affiliate marketing channel, having been using this type of marketing almost since it's inception in the UK.

To enable an affiliate relationship to be established, it is usual for an independent party to sit between a merchant and publisher website - this middle party would normally be one of the major Affilate Marketing networks. By using a network you can take advantage of their sales and commission tracking technology, and also gain access to their list of many thousand affiliates who are just waiting to promote your website.

We have worked with all the major UK networks :

• 

  Affiliate Window

  Probably the biggest and most recognised network in the UK - with a modern reporting platorm and good reange of affiliates.
• 

  Webgains

  Up and coming network, good interface and great service for merchants and affiliates alike.
• 

  Tradedoubler

  One of the first affiliate networks, with a global reach.

Fairfax Computing has vast experience of assisting our clients with creating the promotional materials that enable affiliates to promote your brand effectively :

• Banner Creative - banner images for both generic branding, and specific offer banners
• Product Feeds - text or XML files containing details of your product catalogue, with automated delivery to the affiliate network for trouble free updating

To enable the whole process to work, some code must be integrated into your checkout pages. Of course all of our solutions are capable of reporting to the approriate affiliate network that you have chosen to work with, either at a summary level, or as detailed as you need to go down to individual product level.

If you decided to work with more than one network was have experience of multi network setup with automatic deduping of sales across the affilate channel so you don't award commission to multiple affiliates.

To help manage your affiliate programme we have created some automated tools to assist with the reconciliation of sales, so you can be sure you only approve those sales which you have processed successfully.

We have even created some of our own affiliate marketing sites, so we are well aware of what it takes for affiliates to promote your site effectively.