Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice where a business will reward one or more affiliates for each customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. It involves three main players, the Merchant (the person selling a product), the Affiliate (the person promoting the product) and the Customer (the person buying the product). Once the Merchant has affiliate tracking software in place (like Affiliate Royale) alongside their payment solution they can start accepting affiliate signups. After an Affiliate signs up for an affiliate program they are given tracking links and sometimes banner ads provided by the Merchant's affiliate tracking software to use in their marketing activities to promote the merchant's products. When a customer clicks on the affiliate's link and then goes on to make a purchase that sale is tracked and the merchant pays the affiliate a commission for the sale.
What are the benefits of Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing is an extremely beneficial for Merchants (people who sell products and/or services online) because it allows them to effectively recruit a salesforce to promote their product without spending any money upfront. Merchants only have to pay Affiliates after a sale has been made — so cash flow is much easier to predict and account for.
In turn, Affiliate Marketing is very beneficial to the Affiliate because they can make money from activities like blogging and email marketing without going through product development or having to support a product.
Who should use Affiliate Royale?
If you sell anything online and want to get other people to help you promote your products and services then Affiliate Royale is for you. Affiliate Royale will help you easily setup an Affiliate Program, get people to sign up for your program, provide banner ads to them, track their marketing activities and pay them commissions for any sales they refer to you.
Can Affiliate Royale be branded with my own website theme's header and styling?
Absolutely … If you install Affiliate Royale on your own site then it will use your look and feel. Affiliate Royale just replaces the content of a normal WordPress page, so it will look just like the rest of the pages on your site.
Does Affiliate Royale track commissions on recurring payments?
Currently Affiliate Royale supports this when using PayPal, WishlistMember+PayPal or Authorize.net ARB as the integration method. We're working on adding additional integrations where this will be possible.
What is Shopping Cart Integration?
Integration is a way to connect Affiliate Royale to your current website, shopping cart, or payment gateway, in a way that Affiliate Royale will be notified about purchases. When notified, Affiliate Royale registers the sale, finds the referring affiliate (if any,) and credits the appropriate commission for them.
Is integrating my shopping cart hard?
Integration usually means adding only a few lines of code into your pages and sometimes (like with the Shopp plugin) you don't need to do anything. Everything you need to do for integration is described in detail in the user manual. Not every cart or payment solution is supported but you can find an expanding list of payment solutions we support on our Integration Options page.
Does Affiliate Royale allow merchants to make animated ads available to their affiliates?
Yes, animated GIF banners can be uploaded easily on the “Links & Banners” admin panel page. However, flash-based banners are not supported at this time.
Can you do anything like provide email templates or other materials for affiliates?
This feature isn't directly supported within Affiliate Royale yet but since it is running on WordPress, just add these materials to a page on your website and link to that page from your Affiliate Dashboard Welcome Message
Yup, Affiliate Royale updates automatically just like any plugin you'd find in the WordPress Repository.
Yes, we will consider refunds, but only in some special situations. You can find more information about the refund policy on the terms and conditions page.
Can I Setup Affiliate Royale to track commissions of offline sales?
There is no direct feature for this in Affiliate Royale yet but it is possible with a bit of work to get this setup. What you'd do is put an affiliate tracking pixel on whatever page you're using as your thank you page (for offline sales its usually the page after someone fills out a contact form). The sale will be tracked at that point so if the offline sale goes through you don't need to do anything. But if the sale doesn't go through you'll find the transaction for the sale and enter a “refund” for the transaction — this will back out the commission for the sale so at the end of the month your commission report is accurate.