How Cider Can Help You Grow Your Business with Affiliate Marketing

We are delighted to announce that, with the upcoming 2020.5 Advantage release, our eCommerce platform Cider will provide a connector with Affilae, a platform dedicated to affiliate marketing. This enterprising marketing approach is growing among eCommerce players, including the publishing industry. It is something worth looking into if you don't use it yet.

Wikipedia defines affiliate marketing as a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts.

Here’s an example. Imagine an influencer promotes a book (or publication) through his/her blog or social network account that you market in your eCommerce store. If he/she puts a link to the product, you might receive orders from that blog’s followers. Affiliate marketing would structure the relationship with this influencer so that you would give him/her a commission from all sales initiated from the blog. Here is where a platform such as Affilae comes into play. It acts as the secure middleman, managing the commission rules and compensation for the traffic between the blog or social network account and your eCommerce site. Without such a safeguard, fraud is all too common.

Power for your business

Affiliate marketing was developed in the early stages of the internet, in 1994. Amazon started it in 1996 and has made it a significant and successful promotional channel. Since then, its usage has only been expanding, especially with social network omnipresence today.

Using affiliate programs on a large scale can help you build a strong order conversion channel, as many brands have already done. And as a publisher, you could profit from both sides of the relationship. Through your content, you may become a high-performing affiliate (such as Buzzfeed and its new strategy or as FOLIO: predicted) but as a business, you may use affiliates to increase your online sales.

What does Affilae give you?

Affilae is a French company founded in 2012 and located in Bordeaux. Affilae offers unique capabilities which distinguish it from other solutions on the market:
• As a SaaS platform, the solution is easy to implement wherever you are, with a reasonable monthly fixed fee, depending on click-volume tiers. No % of income or anything else to pay.
• Multi-sharing capabilities enable commissions for all the stakeholders of a shared sales effort.
• Commission policies can be set up by affiliate groups with multiple rules.
• Anti-fraud features prevent your site from click fraud and program ID hijacking.

The company now offers nearly 450 programs in a wide range of sectors. Affilae is a France based company that today grows internationally. Its programs include both BtoC and BtoB. If you want to know more, just contact them here.

How does it work in Cider?

Once the Affilae module is activated, you can start creating your program on the Affilae website. The company provides a video detailing all the steps, and also allows you to create a trial program for 20 days. The setup steps include the following:

• Create a general program (you can create several ones over time) with some management settings (there are many options) and the link to the target site.
• Create one or more rules corresponding to different commission policies. For example, you may vary your policy by product type or by type of affiliate.
• Create one or more affiliate groups. For each of these groups, you indicate which commission rules are active and specify their value. For example, pay for clicks using a fixed amount or a percentage of the order.

Affiliates will join the program on Affilae's website and, after you approve them, join one of the groups you have created.

On the Cider side, setup is simple. In addition to Affilae's program ID, you just need to provide the site-level conversion codes (a code corresponds to the unique combination of affiliate group and rule) that apply to all products (or leave it blank if you don't want a general rule). At the product level, add conversion codes specific to that reference.

All the setup can be done in one or two hours and you are ready to start!

Once all this initial work is done and your first affiliates have joined your program, each time a user is routed from the affiliate to your site (via Affilae, but it's transparent for the user), Cider will send the order information to Affilae which will automatically generate the corresponding commissions on the affiliate's account. Commissions may go through a manual validation process if you still want to double-check them before sending the payment. It’s a very smooth process.