How to setup affiliate marketing for my website?

[EcommerceSite]

I work for an ecommerce company and would like to setup some sort of affiliate marketing similar to Amazon.

1. If someone was referred to our site and they made a purchase we would pay out.

2. If we referred a user to someone else's page and they made a purchase we would get paid.

I looked into http://www.commissionfactory.com/ but wasn't sure if that would meet my needs. Does anyone have any recommendations?

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi

We use a company called Awin (Affiliate Window) in the UK and they are very good.

As far as I am aware there is no two way affiliates, but the easiest way round it is, to set your self up as a publisher and advertiser.

Its quite easy to do, and you could be up and running as an a publisher in minutes.

Thanks

Andy

[Ray-pp]

If you give me a few of your direct competitors I will do a search to see if they have any inbound affiliate links to their website.

[EcommerceSite]

From what I have found none of my competitors are using affiliate marketing so it would be nice to get in early. I didn't think it would be free, I figured there would be some cost involved. I just talked to Hasoffers and they seemed to be pretty impressive I might give them a try.

[CandymanKen]

Hi-

I am personally not aware of any "two way" affiliate programs, but for setting up an affiliate program for your site (pay people for referrals), Ray had some good suggestions for places to start.

I would add the following two thoughts:

1. Depending on your ecommerce platform, you might be able to find low cost affilaite plugins. For example, I know that Magento has several available. The downside to something like this is that you need to build a network of affiliates yourself. If you go with one of the affiliate networks you have an army for affiliates that can choose to list your products.

2. Try to make sure that whatever affiliate program you use has a way to mark a customer as coming to your site first (a cookie on your site). When we set up an affiliate program  what would happen is that someone would go through the order order process then when they got to checkout they jump off the site for a minute to go find a coupon. When they returned they would have the affiliate ID of the coupon site, so that site would earn a commission even though they were really not the referrer.

That's my 2¢ !

Good Luck

Ken

[Ray-pp]

There are not any very effective free solutions that I'm aware of, and hopefully someone can add one here so I do become aware.

However, if you're interested in controlling your affiliate program, than Hasoffers is a great product with a low entry cost. You can also look into the popular affiliate networks, such as Neverblue advertising and Commission Junction.

Also, look at your competitors affiliate programs and see what they are using.