Setting up your affiliate programme.

1. Create your account

Go to affiliatant.com/signup. You need your name, your work email address, your business name, and a password of at least twelve characters.

You are also asked for an address. This becomes the web page where people apply to join your programme, at affiliatant.com/join/your-name, so pick the name your customers know you by. Leave it blank and we take it from your business name.

We email you a link. Following it creates the account, signs you in and opens your console. The link lasts 48 hours. Nothing is created until you follow it, so if the email does not arrive, check the address you typed and sign up again.

The free band covers 20 attributed sales a month, for one programme, which is one shop. Every feature is in it. No card is needed and there is nothing to cancel. Past the monthly figure, sales are still recorded but commission waits until the month turns or you change band.

2. Set your commission

In the console, open Programmes and choose yours. Four things to decide:

• The rate. A percentage or a flat amount per sale. Most shops start between 5% and 15%. You can set different rates per product or per category later.
• What the percentage applies to. Tick exclude tax and exclude shipping unless you have a reason not to; paying commission on postage is paying commission on something you did not profit from.
• The attribution window. How long after clicking an affiliate's link a sale still counts. Thirty days is the common choice. Longer is more generous to affiliates.
• The holding period. How long commission waits before it can be paid. Set this to at least your returns window. It is what stops you paying commission on an order that comes back.

3. Allow the sites your affiliates may link to

On the Destinations tab, add your shop's domain. Until you do, your affiliates cannot build a single link, and the error they see tells them to ask you.

This exists so that your tracking links can only ever send a visitor to your own site. A redirect that will send somebody anywhere is one that can be used to make a link to another site look like a link to yours.

4. Publish your terms

On the Signup tab, write the terms affiliates agree to. Nobody can join until you have. Cover at least: the commission rate, when it is paid, the minimum payout, what happens on a refund, and what they may not do. Promoting you with paid search on your own brand name is the usual thing to prohibit.

Each affiliate's acceptance is recorded against a numbered version. Change the terms later and you can still see which version each person agreed to and when.

5. Connect your shop

CubeCart

1. Download the plugin from affiliatant.com/downloads.
2. Unzip it into modules/plugins/ on your store.
3. In your store's admin, go to Manage Extensions, find Affiliatant and enable it.
4. Open its settings and fill in the five values from your Affiliatant console. They are listed in step 6 below.
5. Press Test connection. It sends a real test sale and tells you what came back. A test sale never creates real commission, whatever your settings say.
6. Check the Status tab. All five hooks should show as live. If one does not, disable and re-enable the plugin: enabling through the marketplace toggle sometimes writes the module row without the hooks.

WooCommerce

1. Download the plugin from affiliatant.com/downloads.
2. In WordPress, go to Plugins, Add New, Upload Plugin, choose the zip and activate it.
3. Open Affiliatant in the WordPress menu and fill in the same five values.
4. Press Test connection.
5. Choose which order statuses count as a sale. Processing and Completed are the usual pair.

6. The five settings both plugins need

All from your Affiliatant console. Settings, then API keys, except the last.

7. Prove the tracking works before you tell anybody

On your console's front page there is a tracking light and a test-click button. Press it. It makes a real click through the real recorder, so when the light goes green it means what it says.

Then do it properly: add yourself as an affiliate, copy your own tracking link, open it in a private browser window, and place a small real order. It should appear in Conversions within a minute, credited to you, with the reason shown. Do this before you invite anybody. Finding out that tracking was wrong after thirty affiliates have been promoting you for a fortnight is the one genuinely bad outcome in affiliate marketing.

8. Find your affiliates

Affiliatant gives you a page to send people to and the materials to put in front of them. It does not go and find them for you. Here is what works, roughly in order of how well it works.

Your own customers, first

People who already buy from you are the best affiliates you will ever get: they know the products and they are already recommending you for nothing. Email your list once. Say what the commission is, say it plainly, and link to your join page.

Your join page

Yours is at affiliatant.com/join/your-name. Put the link in your site footer, on a short "Affiliates" or "Work with us" page, in your order confirmation email, and on your social profiles. Most programmes get more sign-ups from the footer link than from anything else they do.

You choose what the application form asks and whether applications are approved automatically or by you. Approve by hand to begin with. It takes a minute per person and it is how you avoid the coupon-site problem.

People who already write about your products

Search for your product category plus "review" or "best". The people on the first two pages are already sending traffic to somebody. Write to them individually, name the article of theirs you read, and say what you pay. A personal email to ten of them beats a mailshot to a thousand.

Give them something to use

In Creatives, upload banners in the usual sizes and write two or three short pieces of copy they can paste. An affiliate with nothing to use writes nothing. Keep product images current; a creative showing last season's packaging gets quietly dropped.

Coupon codes

Give each affiliate their own code. It tracks a sale even when the click was lost, it works in a podcast or a video where a link cannot be clicked, and it gives their audience a reason to use it. Set your coupon rule first so you know what happens when somebody arrives through one affiliate's link and uses another's code.

What to say when you write to them

Keep it to five lines: who you are, what you sell, what you pay and on what, how long the cookie lasts, and the link to apply. Affiliates read a lot of these. The ones that get answered say the rate in the first sentence.

9. Paying them

Affiliatant works out what each affiliate is owed and produces a file telling you who to pay and how much, with any refunds already netted off. You make the payment yourself, from your own bank, PayPal or Wise. We never hold your money.

Where it applies, we also raise the self-billed invoice on the affiliate's behalf with the right VAT treatment, so neither of you has to chase paperwork.

Ask affiliates to add a payout method before your first pay run. Anybody without one is left out of it, and the preview tells you who.

Getting help

support@affiliatant.com, and include your programme name. The API reference covers anything you want to automate.