ShareASale is a good platform to join if you are looking to get involved in marketing different affiliate programs to earn additional income. ShareASale has earned a reputable name in the industry as well as multi-millions of dollars for its vendors and affiliates. The fact that merchants need to pay a significant amount of money to get featured on ShareASale hints at how serious they all are about their affiliate programs.
- Huge selection of merchants, products snd services
- Good Tools and Training Tools
- Free for affiliates to join
- Easy access to Affiliate Managers
- Payouts are always on time
- Website is fast and well organized
- Underfunded Sellers go offline
- Some dissatisfied with $50.payout threshold
- No PayPal payouts
- Some find platform outdated
Contents
Company
ShareASale (a part of AWIN) was founded in 2000 by Brian Littleton, and to date has over 4000 merchant programs hosted on its network platform targeting small and mid-size merchants.
ShareASale is among the largest of U.S. affiliate networks in terms of the number of advertisers and has close to 1 million affiliates. More than 86% of all affiliates say they are a member of the network.
ShareASale makes it easy for an affiliate to have success with quality advertisers and programs. The network also has its own set of features such as a text ad widget builder, where you can build your own banner-styled widget for your blog or website. You can also create custom deep links, which is a much better way to promote a merchant. Datafeeds are also readily available for more advanced affiliates.
ShareASale retail merchants generally pay high commission rates and have long cookie lengths. - Great news for marketers!
ShareASale's impressive service offers real-time tracking so users will know the moment a banner or link is clicked.
Categories
ShareASale’s “main” productsand services categories are as follows:
- 1: Art/Media/Performance
- 2: Auto/Boat/Plane
- 3: Books/Reading
- 4: Business/Services
- 5: Computer
- 6: Electronics
- 7: Entertainment
- 8: Fashion
- 9: Food/Beverage
- 10: Gifts/Specialty
- 11: Home/Family
- 16: Metaphysical
- 17: Parts/Equipment
- 12: Personal Care
- 13: Sports/Outdoors
- 14: Toys/Games
- 15: Travel
Within these main categories are literally hundreds of sub-categories. Visit ShareASale Website
Tools
Advertiser profiles are very informative for publishers and some advertisers allow auto-approval. Once you apply for merchants, you will need to wait until they approve you as an affiliate. This process usually takes 48 hours and some merchants may take longer to get back to you. Once approved, you will be provided with links, banners, API and basically any tools you need in order to help you succeed as an affiliate. API requests are only set at 600 per month which may hinder some.
Affiliates can search the marketplace to find out more about particular products and vendors including their available promotional materials and sales statistics.
ShareASale offers a robust search tool that lets you filter merchants by category, keywords, sales commission structure, or length of time with Shareasale. You can also look at the top 100 merchants on the site to see if any match your website niche.
Custom-Links
In the link section, there are generic affiliate links, typically linking to the main page of a particular merchant but custom links can often work much better. What this does is it enables you to link to any page on a merchants website, with an affiliate link directing your customer to the exact place they are wanting to go.
Other Features
At the top of each results page you'll see a couple featured merchants, but scrolling down you'll see the full list of merchants under each category. Each of the merchants listed will have an overview of the program details including the following:
- Per Sale: This is the commission rate of the program on average. This can be listed either as a percentage or a dollar amount depending on how the commission for that merchant works.
- Power Rank: This shows you where the merchant falls in terms of their ranking against all other vendors in terms of earnings. If your vendor is one of the top 0-999 vendors, you'll see their exact number ranking. If it doesn't fall within the top 1,000 then you'll just see 1000+.
- EPC: The Earnings Per Click is the average earnings per 100 customers who click that affiliate's link. If 100 people clicked the link, and their total earnings for all 100 was $1,000, the EPC would be $10.
- Keywords: The keywords show you what typical products/customer types are likely to purchase from this merchant. You can search for keywords as well in the search bar to find potential merchants.
To know more information about any merchant click on the merchant's name to open their full details. Here you'll find additional stats and information. You will also find helpful information for choosing your partner and the full commission details. Some merchants may have different commissions for certain product types. Click on the Commission Rates tab to see the full details.
Commissions
There are two merchant marketing models to earn money with ShareASale:
- Pay Per Lead - You get paid every time a visitor follows your affiliate link to a merchant’s lead capture form and fully completes it.
- Pay Per Sale -You earn a commission when visitors follow your direct link to a product or webpage and then make a purchase.
Getting paid
Transactions are shown as they’re made. You won’t have to wait around until the next day to see the transactions. The minimum payment threshold on ShareASale is $50. You can also increase the threshold limit in the edit settings page if you choose.
Payments are sent out on the 20th of the next month of the month of earning the commission. That means if you make $100 in January, you will receive that $100 on the 20th of the next month.
Setup is simple
A great thing about ShareASale is there is no barrier to entry like some networks. It doesn’t matter how much traffic you have, you can sign up even if you’re a total beginner.
Fill out the application which will take about 5 minutes. Once the application is complete, our team reviews it and will send you an email notification upon approval. This could take 1 to 3 business days depending on the type of application you fill out.
During this process you will be asked for your primary website. Be truthful answering the questions on the bottom of this screen but the following are most likely to get you approved
Create an email address for your site (your ShareASale account will be processed more quickly if you use an email associated with your website instead of using Gmail, Yahoo or another kind of free email address).
Conclusion
With ShareASale's affiliate requirements, great selections of products to promote along with consistent payouts make ShareASale a great affiliate network for beginners as well as veterans.
I have enjoyed using the network over the years and have had the most trouble-free experience of all networks I use. Yup! Big praise!
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