Best Affiliate Marketing Platforms

The word affiliate marketing refers to a program or system where the affiliate earns commission by marketing products of third-party products. Affiliate and other marketing types are the basis of business development and the best marketing method in digital marketing. Many marketers learn affiliate vending not only through business schools and universities but by learning trading or hawking courses online as well. Affiliate marketing usually involves a group of three people. The first person or company is known as the seller, who'll be responsible for selling and managing the products to market.

He usually has the highest amount of investment. The second company is known as the network. The network is responsible for giving the platform to affiliates to choose which product they want to promote. It also handles all the seller's and affiliates' payments, provides unique tracking links to affiliates, and manages all the things behind that affiliate link. The third person is you, the affiliate. Affiliate is responsible for promoting the products to his audience. As a bounty, the affiliate will earn a small commission from each made by his unique affiliate link. In this article, we're going to review the 18 best affiliate marketing platforms for you! So let's get into it!

GetRewardful

GetRewardful is a completely SaaS-based marketplace where business owners can create their own subscription-based SaaS services. Stripe's payment and invoicing are all handled, and users can integrate their Rewardful's SaaS service with their website. After configuring the campaign and Stripe, the package will get live on Rewarful service. When it comes to affiliate marketing in rewardful, yes, they also offer an affiliate program. Different affiliates can join this website as an affiliate.

They could be bloggers, social media influencers, or agencies. The affiliate then can choose any paid SaaS campaign and Get

Rewarful will provide them a unique affiliate link. The affiliate will earn a commission when a customer subscribes to that campaign through their unique affiliate link. Now, when it comes to the commission, it is completely dynamic. Every campaign owner can adjust the commission according to his choice. However, we recommend you to join the campaign that offers at least 10-20%. We don't know about their tracking cookie's life, but we guess they offer a 30-days tracking cookie. You can use Stripe, PayPal, or Payoneer to withdraw your commission profit.

Pros

SaaS-based products that provide high conversions.

30-days tracking cookie life.

Easy integration with 3rd party websites

Cons

It takes 30 days to receive your funds in your bank account.

TapAffiliate

Tapffliate is a SaaS-based service that offers digital business owners to create their own affiliate marketing programs to increase sales. It helps online businesses by letting them create their referral programs and allow another 3rd party affiliate to join their program and drive the audience to their business. The website owner will integrate the Tapfliate with his website by placing a code of automated bot in his website. The owner can now create any campaign, SaaS subscription, or just sell his products on the website.

If an affiliate gets interested in his products, he can sign-up through Tapfilliate and get access to the website's referral programs. Tapfiliate will give the affiliate a unique tracking affiliate link to trace all the customers that came from the affiliate's link. Whenever the customer who is redirected from the affiliate's link makes a purchase, Tapfiliate will detect it and track the customer's activity. If the customer purchases within 30 days, the affiliate will get the reward as a small commission from the total sale.

Pros

Easy integration with websites

Easy to sign-up as an affiliate

Keeps tracking of activities of the customers

Cons

Doesn't offer campaigns on their own website.

LeadDyno

LeadDyno is an all-in-one affiliate tracking service that allows e-commerce and SaaS-based websites run their affiliate programs and loyalty networks that increase their sales and profit. It works on the simple basis of commission. You install the API and integrate the LeadDyno with your website. Create and configure your affiliate program and get it live and it's simply the best affiliate marketing platform we've ever seen. The affiliates will visit your website. If they find it interesting to work with your website as an affiliate, they can sign-up through LeadDyno and start promoting your website's products to their audience. LeadDyno allows you to create an affiliate portal for your affiliate where they can keep track of every sale, click, and conversion. The website owner can see and track all the campaigns, leads, visitors, total joined affiliate, and purchased items on the main admin dashboard. Not just that, you can also send emails to your affiliate so that they'll know about your referral program.

Pros

Supports more than 20 most popular integrations.

Dedicated admin panel for keeping track of your affiliate's

Dedicated dashboard for an affiliate.

Cons

They don't support Payoneer, so people, where PayPal and Stripe aren't supported may face difficulty.

Refersion

No matter what you are selling online, creating an affiliate referral program is a great way to effectively grow sales and drive leads. Refersion makes affiliate marketing easy, and with their live checklist, you can get going in seven minutes or less. Instantly connect your shopping cart, customize your affiliate registration page with branded colors and special fields and start tracking orders immediately. In addition to links, Refersion is one of the few platforms to support tracking through unique coupon codes and SKU. Finding affiliates is now simpler than ever with their post-purchase channel that converts customers into affiliates and the reversion marketplace directory that helps bring affiliates to you. Each of your affiliates will have their dashboard to share their link, grab embeddable banners for their site, and track activity in real-time. You can stay in the loop with affiliates. Using the email channel, easily edit and auto send notifications to affiliates on different events. For example, upon approval of their account, when they referred a new sale or when they have a payment headed their way. It's simply the best affiliate marketing platform for newly started businesses.

Pros

Easy integration with Shopify and PayPal

Customize the dashboard in the way you want

Allows you to send custom emails to the affiliates when they complete the desired action.

Cons

The prices are a bit higher.

Post Affiliate Pro

Post Affiliate Pro is a cloud-based SaaS tool that offers digital business owners increased sales and gain leads by starting running an affiliate program. It works by offering the business owners to create their affiliate programs, referral programs, or voucher promotions. You don't need any HTML knowledge; everything on this tool is completely GUI-based. It lets you easily create your affiliate programs so that other people will promote your products, and they'll earn a commission from every sale they made. The tool gives you the ability to track all your registered affiliates, their performance, total sales made by affiliated customers, and even their location. You can reward your high-performing affiliates so that they'll continue to work with you with the same motivation in the future. Besides rewards, you can disable the inactive user account to save space for other affiliates. With over 170+ payment integrations, you don't need to worry about the payment system. All you need to do is add the code HTML code to your website, and Post Affiliate Pro will handle the rest.

Pros

Fraud protection; automatically detects bot traffic.

Excellent customer care

Offers more than 50+ integrations

Cons

Nothing unique. Others offer the same service at the same price tag.

First Promoter

The first promoter is one of the most advanced and high-tech affiliate tracking systems we've seen. It works on the system of tracking the links of affiliates. First Promoter allows you to create affiliate campaigns, vouchers, and referral programs. The affiliates will have their own dashboard to see all the performance of their redirected audience and the total amount of commission of the current month. You'll have access to the admin panel, where you can keep an eye on all of your registered affiliate's performance and the total invoice to be paid to your affiliates. If we are talking about payments, we would also like to mention that you can easily pay thousands of affiliates in just one click. Through its integration, you can directly link your PayPal or Stripe account with the First Promoter. The network will deduct the payout amount from your integrated patent system. It also offers fraud detecting AI, which automatically recognizes bot traffic and bans those affiliates who use bot traffic to scam your campaign.

Pros

A most advanced type of affiliate tracking service

Set your own dynamic commission rates.

Additional campaign bonuses are supported.

Cons

Not good for e-commerce websites that sell physical goods.

Ambassador

Without effective brand ambassadors promoting, it's difficult to gain mind share and market share. Ambassador is the only platform that automates and scales all your relationship marketing efforts like customer referrals, affiliates, influencers,d partner programs. From easy sharing experiences tracking and attribution to custom rewards and commission fulfillment ambassadors and their world-class success team, you can manage and optimize all these programs with Ambassador. B2C and B2B brands can now rapidly implement and own the entire experience with features like simple website integration, branded share links, a visual editor to design and update your program in real-time. It also provides dashboards for your brand ambassadors to see their results. Their direct integration with CRM, e-commerce, and billing applications, plus an open API, allow you to customize your program and reward specific goals like purchases, leads, downloads, or revenue thresholds. Robust analytics give your team the information necessary to continually optimize for success. Referred customers spend more and are more loyal and more likely to make referrals.

Pros

Best for large scale businesses

Send payments in one click

Free API supported

Cons

The dashboard might be complicated for some new users.

iDev Affiliates

iDev Affiliate is an online tool that allows you to create affiliate campaigns and manage them. According to our research, iDev affiliates is the oldest affiliate tracking platform on the internet. They offer the business owners to create and keep track of all of their affiliate promotions or campaigns. Users can configure their website with iDev's API so that you can create and configure the campaign in steps. All you need to do is to complete the ten steps configuration for your website, and your campaign will get a life! You can send the email promotions to your registered or subscribed users to increase your affiliates' number. The best thing that we like about the iDev affiliate is that they offer your affiliate's the ability to share content directly from their affiliate accounts. In this way, you can easily build your business presence on social media as well. Moreover, you can send direct coupon codes to your affiliates. So that the buyer will get a discount, you'll get a sale, and the affiliate gets a discount!

Pros

Easy integration with social media accounts

10 steps configuration and launch your affiliates program in a matter of minutes

Let your affiliate share the products on social media through their account

Cons

You don't have an option to buy a customized enterprise package.

Impact

The impact is not just an affiliate network but a complete solution for digital businesses. They provide solutions to digital businesses and help them to solve their common problem. The main services they offer are email hosting, mobile apps, and affiliate. But here, our main focus is on their affiliate system. Impact website is basically not an affiliate tracking website, and you don't need to place any kind of API code on your website. Unlike other websites, it doesn't offer the tracking and managing system for your affiliates. Instead, the affiliate will contact you through impact. You can say it's a marketplace where the seller and affiliate can contact each other through the Impact website. All you need to create your affiliate campaign, make it live on the impact, and that's it. The impact will send you some highly professional affiliate. You can shortlist and send them a proposal to join your campaign. Sellers can also apply for your campaign through their own accounts. You can review their past performance and make decisions wisely. The seller and affiliate will have their own dashboard, and you don't need to contact the affiliate yourself. The impact will do this task for you!

Pros

Excellent if your website doesn't have enough traffic.

You don't need to install any kind of API on your website.

No coding required

Cons

Some spammers also exist in this marketplace, just like other marketplaces.

ShareASale

ShareASale is a completely different and unique affiliate marketing platform for both affiliates and sellers. Unlike others, it doesn't require any source code or API on your website. All you've to do is install the tracking code on your website so that ShareASale can track the sales and actions made by affiliates. You don't need to make an affiliate campaign on your website and search for affiliates yourself. Instead, the company will provide your affiliates. You create your affiliate campaigns, set commission, minimum order value, category, and all that TOS for your campaign. The ShareASale team will review your campaign and make it live on the platforms. Therefore, you can say it is a marketplace where merchants and affiliates can contact each other. They can see your campaign on the affiliate's account; if they find it interested, they can apply for it. You'll see their applications on your ShareASale merchant's dashboard and select your partners wisely. However, its subscription fee for the merchant is extremely high (650$), making it good for small businesses or websites.

Pros

No need to install API

No need to search for an affiliate by yourself; ShareASale will do it for you.

Transparent and real-time updates on the dashboard

Cons

Extremely big hidden changes.

ClickBank

ClickBank is the #! Affiliate marketing platform for both merchants and the affiliates. We're not just telling you randomly. In 2018, it became the first affiliate platform that crossed the total revenue (paid) of 3.1 billion USD. Now, in the current date of 2021, it has currently paid over 4.2 billion USD to the affiliates, and still, no one can beat him. With the highest number of affiliates globally, it makes it the best place for merchants to start their campaigns on ClickBank. We like about ClickBank because they don't charge a high amount of money and no hidden charges. You only pay what you see, no hidden charges. Another main benefit of using ClickBank is that you don't have to worry about the affiliates to invite them. Just like ShareASale, ClickBank will send you the affiliate's proposal so that you can choose them wisely. You'll pay one time 50$ for each campaign and 7.5% of Clickbank commission with a 1.5$ fix transaction fee every time.

Pros

Best for small businesses

Get rid of inviting affiliates yourself

Low cost and no hidden charges

Cons

Spammers are also a part of every popular marketplace.

FlexOffers

FlexOffer is an online SaaS-based service that offers digital businesses solutions to help them grow their brand and increase their sales. They help those companies by offering them an affiliate program where other people will promote their business. As a result, the business will pay them a fixed amount of commission on every sale the affiliate will make. You don't need to find an affiliate yourself, FlexOffer will send many high-performing affiliates to you or contact them through FlexOffer. However, their work is a bit different from Clickbank, but one thing common in FO and CB is that they serve as a marketplace for both publishers and affiliates. FlexOffer may contact you and offer you only two conditions. #1 if your website is already running an affiliate program or #2 you don't have an affiliate program but are willing to invest to gain more customers. Or you can apply for the affiliate campaign by yourself by visiting their website.

Pros

Sends only targeted affiliate's who already have worked in your niche before

Best for mid-size companies who wants to increase their customers

Cons

The security fee is a bit higher: 120$.

Awin

Awin is an award-winning online marketing platform for publishers and advertisers. Awin is the second biggest affiliate marketing platform after ClickBank has a network of 15,000 affiliates and 200,000 active affiliate's currently working on the platform. Awin marketplace is designed for large businesses and agencies to offer them marketing solutions and grow their brand through affiliate marketing. However, for new businesses and beginners, they've introduced "Awin Access." Specifically designed for entry-level businesses with low-cost subscriptions and low commission fees. In Awin Access, you can't earn the traffic like normal packages, but enough to make your entry-level brand popular and earn leads. This concept makes it the best affiliate marketing platform for all kinds of businesses,

Pros

Low-cost start-up

No monthly fee. No hidden charges.

Awin Access is best for entry-level businesses.

Cons

Affiliate is 14x higher than advertisers.

CJ Affiliate

CJ Affiliate is another best affiliate marketing platform for merchants. It works based on campaigns. You need to make your affiliate campaigns, publish them on the website, and CJ Affiliate will handle the rest. The CJ affiliate will promote your campaigns to the affiliates available on their platform. The affiliate can apply for your campaign, and you'll receive their applications on your admin dashboard. If we talk about their commission, you can set the commission amount by yourself. But remember, the higher commission you pay, the more authentic and large audience-based affiliates will contact you. If we talk about CJ Affiliate's pricing, they'll charge you about $3000 for the first time. It includes all the registration fees, security deposit, and all required fees. Not just that, you'll have to pay a 500$ monthly fee to CJ Affiliate. Therefore, we will only recommend this platform to you if your website is large enough to pay for its purchase with your profits. But believe us, the affiliates of CJ Affiliate are targeted and give you wish conversion rates than any company can give you.

Pros

CJ worked with some of the biggest multi-national company

Only sends targeted affiliate to you

Best for large scale businesses

Cons

The pricing of CJ isn't suitable for small businesses.

Avangate Affiliate

Avangate Affiliate is a cloud-based affiliate network that works just like ClickBank or ShareASale. It's based on the marketplace concept where both affiliate and publisher can contact each other in one place. You can publish and submit your products on the Avangate that you want to promote. Must select the accurate category because your product will rank in that category. The affiliates can contact you themselves, or you can search for some high-performing affiliates and send them a proposal. It's that simple! According to Avangate itself, they have more than 50,000 affiliates currently working on promoting your business to their audience. One main drawback of Avangate is that they don't have any Android or IOS app, so that you can only use its web version on your phone. There is a one-time fee that is dynamic according to your product. Their agents will decide the fees to charge you after looking at your products. The only thing we know is that they charge 3.5% of commission + 1$ fix amount whenever you pay to affiliates.

Pros

Over 50k network of affiliate's

Best for mid-size businesses

Dynamic subscription fee

Cons

No Android or IOS app

Max Bounty

Mx Bounty is a cost-per-action affiliate marketing platform that works based on the CPA model. You'll pay the affiliate only when his referred audience takes the desired action on your website, like purchasing or subscribing to anything else on your website. Whereas another affiliate website also works on CPI (cost-per-impression.) CPI model is also beneficial that lets your visitor hover over your website and may possible that in future he purchase the service from you when needed. You'll pay the affiliate when the visitor visits and views your website. But in CPA, no matter how many impressions you get, you'll only pay the affiliate if his audience makes a purchase. The same applies to Maxbounty, it works on a PPC model, and you'll pay your affiliate on a PPC basis. All you need is to sign-up on the platform, pay the subscription charge, and get your campaign live! The affiliate can see your affiliate campaign and may contact you if they find it interested. However, if we talk about the pricing of Maxbounty, they didn't mention it on their website. We guess it's dynamic, and you need to quote the pricing by contacting them. But we know enough that they charge a one-time fee for the campaign + security deposit and a commission fee + transaction fee when you pay the affiliates.

Pros

PPC based affiliate marketing

No CPI (cost-per-impression) payouts

Cons

A low number of affiliates because they don't support CPI.

Partner Stack

Partner Stack is an online SaaS-based affiliate marketing program that helps small and large-scale businesses grow their company and increase sales. It works based on affiliate marketing where the publisher, also called affiliate promotes the advertiser's product to his audience. As a reward, Partner Stack pays him a small amount of commission according to the sale value. The thing that we like about the Partner Stack is their subscription fee. Unbelievably, they only charge 25$ for your product campaign.

In comparison, other companies charge at least 50-70$, it's way affordable! They didn't mention the commission they charge from you. We guess you need to contact them for this inquiry. If you've ever used CJ Affiliate, ClickBank, or ShareASale, then PartnerStack would be perfect for you.

Pros

Beautiful and modern UI

Great customer service

Trusted by top-notch affiliates

Cons

Not optimized for smartphones

SkimLinks

SkimLinks is a unique affiliate marketing platform that works based on different marketing models. One thing that we liked about SkimLinks is that this platform is suitable for almost any kind of business. Whether you need just impressions, sign-ups, or sales, you can choose SkimLinks to find your website's affiliates. In comparison, most of the other websites don't offer this feature. The merchant can choose the commission method that could be CPA, PPS, or CPI. In CPA, you pay the affiliate when his referred audience takes any desired action except purchasing. Like sign-up, form filling, or anything that you choose. PPC means that you pay commission only when your audience purchases something from you. CPI means that you pay when the audience visits your website. You can adjust the commission amount by yourself. All these features make SkimLinks one of the best affiliate marketing platforms for any kind of business.

Pros

Support CPC, CPA, and CPI models.

Best for almost any kind of businesses

Cons

The low number of affiliates

How to Choose the Best Affiliate Platform for Your Business

Now, the question appears there are thousands of affiliate marketing platforms out there on the internet. So what platform should you choose for your affiliate marketing? Below we've written a small guide and explained as short as we can how can you choose an ideal best affiliate marketing platform for your business:-

It fits within your niche.

You should remember to always work with a platform that offers your niche and has affiliates working on your niche. However, this idea has nothing to do with non-marketplace-based networks because there, you choose the affiliate of your own choice. In the case of affiliate platforms, we recommend you first have a look if they already have some active campaigns on your niche or not. You can identify if that platform is good for your business or not. It's important that the platform you're choosing already has some active campaigns on your respective category because affiliates commonly choose those categories that have the highest number of campaigns.

Commission levels and earnings

Commission levels mean the amount of commission they deduct whenever the sale is made from an affiliate. Here, it's not that one-time subscribing fee that the platform charges when getting your product live. It's the commission fee that the network deducts when your affiliate makes a sale. For example, if an affiliate earns 10% commission, your affiliate network will also charge 2-3%. However, most of the time, affiliates have to face this fee. You only pay the subscribing fee. When you pay the affiliate, the marketplace deducts commission from your payout and then sends the affiliate's final payout.

Platform support

Customer service in every business matters a lot. If you're running a business that doesn't have good customer support, then you can never get success in your business. The first thing that people look for before paying to any business is the quality of customer assistance of that business. The same applies to affiliate program companies. The best affiliate marketing platform must have good engaging customer support. There is no tolerance for customer care. If your chosen platform has bad customer support, then remember, you'll never have a good experience with that company. Suppose something goes wrong, you contacted them, but their customer support is worse and didn't solve your problem, what would you do? Not just that, the CS of any business shows how good and loyal they are with their customers. So never work with a company that has bad custom care.

Platform reputation

Platform reputation means how popular the platform is and how many affiliates they've. Working with a platform that doesn't have many affiliates is just a waste of time. Platforms like CJ Affiliate, ClickBank and ShareASale, all have a good reputation and are the best affiliate marketing platforms. However, the brand's reputation doesn't decide whether it's worth buying or not, but it shows that the company is trustable.

Platform Portfolio

Platform's portfolio means how their past partnerships and for which companies they've worked in the past. We advise you not to believe what the company says on its homepage, whatever they say. For example, some companies even say that they have worked seriously with Amazon and Microsoft. That's why we recommend you to read their reviews from third-party reviewers. Only they can tell you the truth! Just search your desire affiliate network on Google, and you can see many third-party websites that have already written an honest review on that company.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing is getting more and more popular these days. It's because digital business has drastically increased. We bet that millions of businesses are already out there on the internet, and they are going successful. Now, the question that appears is how you can reach out to your customers and run your game when there're already good players on the ground? That's when affiliate marketing comes. It's all about growing your brand and increasing sales. A third-party person promotes your brand to its audience. His audience visits your website and, ay purchase a product if they like. As a reward, you pay a small amount of commission from the sale he made. Affiliate networks allow you to connect merchants and affiliates to connect, and as a result, they charge some small amount of money from both sellers and merchants. In this article, we've reviewed some of the best affiliate marketing platforms for your business!