Refersion

Refersion sets itself apart from other affiliate management platforms by offering first party reliable tracking and direct integrations with eCommerce stores. Lots of networks use third party tools to track affiliates that are commonly blocked by browsers, which ultimately lose you conversions. 

The tracking flexibility of offering multiple types of conversion triggers - coupon codes, custom links, certain SKU’s, etc. - is also huge. It attracts a large marketplace of legitimate partners who use that data to increase their performance. 

They also have very strong fraud protection. They mitigate fraud from the start by curating who can join their affiliate platform in the first place through an application process. Merchants then have the ability to accept/not accept affiliate requests, block affiliates from using their own link to make a purchase and investigate suspect purchases or returns prior to commissions being paid out. These kinds of measures help to attract the right kind of partners for your business, making it easier to have personalized relationships that actually generate revenue.

And finally, their owned affiliate marketplace is quite large and makes it easy for merchants to plug into a network of existing affiliate partners.

The real metric you're looking to impact here is total top-line revenue and net new customers.

Other than that, a successful affiliate marketing program grows over time, and you want to track your payouts to affiliates. You want this to increase month over month to show growth of the program. Providing success to your affiliates is directly tied to your own success, since they are paid direct commission on sales.

And because of that commission, one final metric to keep in mind is your margin. You may need to adjust commission by product in the store to ensure there are no products you are actually losing money on. For this reason, setting up an appropriate commission structure is very important - everyone needs to win for long-term success to be possible.

This tool will require someone with a reasonable marketing acumen to set up and run it. Usually, that will be your head of marketing, a dedicated marketing or affiliate marketing manager or, if it is a small business, the CEO. 

All in, a program can be up and running in a few hours on a normal Shopify store. You should spend a couple hours prior to setup thinking through your commission structure, setting up content and branding, and then messaging and onboarding your existing partners and affiliates to get them setup. From there you will onboard affiliates, manage payouts and look for fraud, and then continue to grow the program, perhaps through affiliate contests or giveaways or other marketing campaigns.

I believe affiliate marketing is a secondary marketing strategy, not a first. So merchants that have an affiliate program already that is performing for them, but need better oversight would benefit from a tool like Refersion. Likewise, companies that are ready to scale should examine affiliate marketing as an option. Or perhaps you already have 10 or so partners or affiliates and are looking for a better system to track their success and pay them out.

The marketplace brings its best value to differentiated products from mid-market and growing brands, so for example, Shopify Plus merchants do really well with Refersion.

On the flip side, merchants who are just starting out and don’t have a strong brand or traction would not benefit from an affiliate program. It is not a magic pill that will take you from zero to one hundred. Affiliate marketing is a growth strategy that should be added on to an already successful marketing strategy.