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Ask HN: Affiliate Programs

39 points by jcnnghm ↗ HN
I have a software as a service app that I've decided I would like to offer an affiliate program for. I spent some time today looking at various programs that are available and they all seem to have relatively high monthly fees, high setup fees, and obtuse setup processes.

Does anyone know of a simple affiliate program without setup or monthly fees? Ideally the provider would setup the affiliate accounts, charge me for the affiliate commissions plus their cut, then pay the affiliates. On my end, I'd look for the affiliate code and setup a cookie, and make a POST to the program with the affiliate code when someone signs up. I'd also like to review the affiliate applications to make sure they aren't spammy.

Does anything like this exist? What do you all use? If nothing like this exists, would anyone use it if I built it?

26 comments

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proexploit
I've looked for the same thing for many hours with no luck.
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mbenjaminsmith
I was actually looking for the same thing the other day and didn't find anything. I haven't looked into it that far yet but I think I'm going to roll my own. Whatever the costs would be, I'd rather that amount go to either us or the affiliate.

Are you interested in building and selling this or just making it available to others? Either way I'd be interested in helping in exchange for a working product. If you're interested ping me at mbenjaminsmith [at] gmail [dot] com.

jcnnghm
I think I'll probably end up building something, and if I publicly release it, I would have to charge something to cover the risk from fraud, and the transaction processing costs. My initial thought is to charge between 5 and 10 percent of the commissioned amount. In other words, if the company is offering a 10% commission, and they make a $100 sale, I would take $11 from them, passing $10 on to their affiliate.
jasonlbaptiste
Hey there, were building exactly this with cloudomatic(flow) : flow.cloudomatic.com. It's a pretty big problem, especially for app developers. Feel free to reach me via email at : j@cloudomatic.com .
paraschopra
I would be very interested in this. Are you building it currently or is it already in a workable condition?
jasonlbaptiste
In the middle of building now. Fairly far along too. We needed it out yesterday after seeing initial demand, but were moving fast as we can :).
paraschopra
Good luck. I think you will solve a huge pain point if you come up with a no brainier, no hassle affiliate/partner program. All I would need is a simple API to tell you which partner did the transaction and how much was the transaction worth. There are couple of inputs that you may want to consider:

* Allow setting of different commissions to different partners

* Don't force user to define plans. He may want to do a lot of custom plans and pay affiliates for it.

* Payouts using Paypal would be nice

* Don't know if you would like to get into this, but 2nd tier affiliate program is also nice to have

* Keep your commissions really low ;) (This is because already your users would be giving a lot of commissions: to affiliates, to paypal, to merchant banks, etc.)

jasonlbaptiste
Thank you :)

1) probably more for v2 2) were trying to be really flexible 3) in v1 4) Probably v2, but if we see a huge demand for it, it will be part of an incremental release before v2 5) in v1 :-D

ccollins
This looks really cool, but I was pretty turned off by lack of pricing details. This is all I could find:

"Cloudomatic(flow) has no sign-up fees, monthly fees, or minimum transaction amounts. We only make money when you make money."

Can you be more specific?

jasonlbaptiste
Yeah, we did that since were still trying to gauge fair pricing. Basically the original poster here has what were looking to do: take a % of affiliate revenue made. No fees to setup/integrate either. Exact %? were still working those details out. Volume tiering too - ie the % goes down with volume too.
jcnnghm
Looks good, when does it launch?
jasonlbaptiste
1.5 to 2 months to give you the God honest realistic timeframe.
rgrieselhuber
I think Posterous just started using something that is super-easy to set up.
jasonlbaptiste
You mean viglink? That's more for publishers to make money. I think the op was referring to software that enables saws/ web app developers to setup their own affiliate program.
amih
I'm interested too! A 2nd tier affiliate would be very interesting addition.
thefool
I would possibly be interested.
braindead_in
You can implement it on your own and advertise it. There are several networks where you can post the information.
barmstrong
I'd say develop it yourself.

It only took about a day in rails.

- make a migration to add "referrer_id" to users table

- put a before filter in application_controller to watch for a special param used in affiliate codes, if it exists store in session

- when new users sign up set their referrer_id out of the session if it exists

- whenever the "action" is taken by the user that triggers a referral commission, put this is pending transactions

- use a monthly cron job and paypal gem to send affiliate commission each month

That was the gist anyway.

jarin
I built something exactly like this in Rails for a client, and it was cake. As long as your affiliate commissions aren't excessive (like the 70% commissions in the porn industry), you really don't have to worry too much about click fraud either.
nextbee
Check out our service (http://www.nextbee.com). We can do tracking based on referring domain as well so you will get SEO benefit also from your partners.
joubert
So many people seem to be reinventing the wheel. Is there perhaps an open source solution?
dmurko
Clickbank (www.clickbank.com) which is used by most internet/affiliate marketers is a great solution if you don't mind that they'll manage all your billing/affiliate transactions. They have a secure shopping cart, they automatically pay affiliates and the setup is just 50$ or something. But they do take about 10% of each transaction.

But you can't review your affiliates or in anyway edit their payment process.

On the other hand they have over 10.000 affiliates in all niches.

It all depends on what your priorities are - do you want an army of affiliates or would you just like to offer the program to a few selected ones.

(I'm in no way affiliated with Clickbank, we're also looking for payment processing for our web app)

Sky1234
Check out hasoffers.com. Their freeversion is pretty good.