Doggie Style Affiliate Program

[s.m.u.r.f]

Hi,

After some advice from another post, we have developed an affiliate program at Doggie Style - Ireland's Leading Mobile Dog Grooming Service (which is almost ready to go) without realising that there are pre-built solutions out there to do the hard work for you. I probably should have done a bit of research into the whole thing before going head-long into it and developing our own solution, although it was a good learning experience.

I was looking for some opinions on what we may be missing. The way it works at the moment is that we will supply affiliate program members with a set of banners and textual links that they can use to link to us. Parameters in the link url will identify the affiliate to us and we will log the activity of the user. We are going to pay out for each fulfilled booking that is generated by the affiliate. We have an Affiliate members account page set up to give them details of their account (see Doggie Style's Irish Pet Affiliate Program and u = afftest, p = 1234). We also allow affiliates to collect the Callback or Booking Request details on their own site and then POST them to us.

We still need an affiliate sign-up page rather than having the prospective affiliates emailing us and a T&Cs page but I'm working on that. Another thing I think I might need is automatic banner and textual updates to allow us to run different campaigns but I'm not really sure how to go about implementing this. Is there anything else that I should be developing?

I see from this forum that there are Affiliate Management type site that handle affiliate program signups, should I be trying to go with them to expand the aff network or should I contact prospective websites directly?

And finally the biggest bone of contention in the office about this whole thing is the payout. Any body have any suggestion as to what is an appropriate payout level for an affiliate program. Before you answer - put on your small business owners hat and see it from my side rather than from the point of view of a webmaster who is trying to maximise profits from their site

Thanks
The Doggie Style Team

 

[s.m.u.r.f]

Another quick question - should it be Affiliate Program or Affiliate Programme?

 

[mneylon]

The way I run ours is that all affiliates get €5 for signing up and pay out is at €50+

In terms of percentages etc., it will depend on your own business model / pricing

ie. if your service always costs say 50 euro, then maybe you want to give 5 euro on the first order ..

 

[s.m.u.r.f]

Blacknight, Thanks for that, It's something to think about. 10% is a higher payout than we were thinking as our margins would suffer too much.

 

[mneylon]

Blacknight, Thanks for that, It's something to think about. 10% is a higher payout than we were thinking as our margins would suffer too much.

Well you'd only be giving 10% on the first sale, so you could consider it as a cost of sale

 

[3rigena]

a suggestion - catering for the provision of subaffiliates is essential imo.

Sounds like u have worked hard on this - best of luck with it.!

 

[s.m.u.r.f]

3rigena,

Thanks for the comment and the good wishes. Is your suggestion about allowing affiliates to sign up online or are you talking about a tiered affiliate scheme. I'm not really sure about how to implement this. Can you suggest a model?

Regards
Stephen

 

[3rigena]

Hi Stephen,

Tiered, maybe cut off after 3 levels- the referring affiliate gets 10% of each of the referred affiliates profits.

how i would implement:

In the affiliate Cpanel, there's gonna be a generate subaffiliate link option, where it points to

yoursite.com/affiliateregistration.php?parentID=referringAffiliateID

they give this code to people however they want - IM, email, forums or link on web-site or whatever.

On your Affiliate registration page, do a check for a get/post variable with name ParentID - if its not there just sign the user up to your scheme as normal, if there is a code, thats the AffiliateID of the Affil that referred the user, so save that in your dbase somewhere and work out the financials via some db queries.

hth, thats just how i would do it.

rgds
niall