Documentation

These Days, A Shopping Cart Affiliate Program Needs Payment Flexibility, Starting With PayPal

More online marketers must support affiliates, often multiple tiers of them (if that's part of the affiliate marketing plan). UltraCart is a pioneer in that regard, by allowing affiliates to be paid the way they often collect their money, through PayPal. It's just part of the reason that UltraCart's shopping cart affiliate program is so well developed. In fact, there are over 50 different combination of options for paying affiliates, including creating special classes or groups. These methods allow the flexibilityt to both automate payment, but also include manual checks and even fraud prevention technology to help keep affiliate payments above board.

Shopping cart affiliate programs need to keep up with the increasing flexibility required by affiliates, including payment types. This option allows or even requires that payments be made through the popular payment gateway, PayPal™.

Add That This Series Of "Must Have's" For Today's Credible Shopping Cart Afilliate Programs

If you are evaluating which shopping cart affiliate program is best, in addition to payment options, here's a short list of featuers that most of our customers have said they needed, and that we've responded to by building these features into UltraCart:

• Shopping cart affiliate programs must take into account that merchants can sometimes have hundreds of affiiates and that paying them must be automated on the one hand, but also needs to provide methods for manual review of payments, particularly for new affiliates that must be evaluated
• Payment to affilliates via the Shopping cart affiliate program must accommodate a range of payment methods, including credit cards in general and secondary payment gateways like PayPal so merchantes can take advantage of frequent buyer points programs and also to allow smaller affiliates the ability for direct transfer all over the world without maintaining credit cart processing accounts
• While not for everyone, many affiliates do maintain "downstream" or multi-tiered affiliates, which often means paying commissions on the same sale to many partners; these mechanisms must be in place in any viable shopping cart affiliate programs and they must provide both oversight and options for splitting these commisisons without errors or chances for fraud
• Since links are the primary means of referring customers, affiliates must have the option of being given all types of link formats in a simple to apply manner to ensure that traffic is directed properly; these link formats should include simple (which requires no formatting or changing by the affiliate), text (which can be assigned to any word or words within the affiliate's website) or image (that can be applied to any image or part of an image in the case of an image map)
• Shopping cart affiliate programs must offer the merchant a means to configure commisions on both a per item basis and through groups of items, or even all items, meaning that affiliates can be paid differently depending on the item group that can include commission inclusions or exclusions (such as for shipping or taxes), changes in commissions for lower margin items like closeouts), and changes based on duration or even geographic location