Affiliate Program Built From Contribution Margin Up

The number that decides whether you have a program is contribution per order after cost of goods, freight, payment fees and returns. Commission comes out of that figure, not out of what your competitor publishes on their affiliate page. I have opened this work by telling a brand that their allowable payout was under four percent and that a program at four percent would attract nobody worth having, so the honest answer was not to launch. That is a possible outcome here, and it costs less than eighteen months of a program nobody wants to be in. Where the build starts: With your order data. Contribution by product band, returns by category, new versus returning mix, and the current attribution picture across paid search, email and organic, so we know which existing demand a program will land on top of before it does. Out of that comes a commission grid by margin band rather than a single rate, an allowable payout ceiling, and a decision about which SKUs are excluded entirely. Programs that pay one rate across the catalogue end up subsidising their worst-margin lines, and partners find those lines faster than merchandising does. Tracking that survives the current browser: Safari caps client-side cookies at seven days and Firefox is not far behind, so server-to-server postback and a first-party tracking subdomain on your own DNS are the baseline, not an upgrade. I specify the implementation, work with your engineers through it, and test it end to end: desktop, mobile web, app if you have one, with a consent banner in the path and again with cookies cleared. I also build the de-duplication rule against paid search and email before launch rather than after the first invoice argument, and set the cookie window deliberately rather than accepting the network default. The terms document: This is the part that gets skipped and then costs money. Brand and trademark bidding prohibited in explicit terms with a monitoring method attached. Coupon and extension policy set at launch, so you are not renegotiating it under pressure in year two. Voucher-code issuance controlled, because uncontrolled codes leak to sites you never approved. GST handled correctly for Australian-registered partners against offshore ones. Disclosure obligations written in, since under the AANA code and Australian Consumer Law the advertiser carries responsibility for what a partner says on your behalf. For education clients, agent-commission arrangements are checked against ESOS obligations before a single link goes live. The first partners: Between twelve and twenty signed and transacting, chosen because their audience overlaps your buyer, not because they applied. I write the outreach, take the calls, and negotiate the individual terms. I do not measure this work by how many partners are recruited, and I would rather hand over eight partners producing revenue than four hundred sitting inactive in a dashboard making the program look busy. The baseline that lets you judge it later: At launch I set an incrementality read: a geographic or customer-segment holdout, or coupon-code suppression where the program leans on codes, with a ninety-day measurement window. Without it, every review of the program in year two is an argument between people with different attribution windows and no facts. Not included: I do not run the program after launch as part of this. I do not write partner-facing creative or manage a content calendar. And I do not launch into networks I consider wrong for your model just because you already have a contract; if that comes up, I will say so before we start. Who should not buy this: Businesses under roughly two hundred orders a month, where a program will not attract partners worth having. Anyone who cannot give me order-level data. And any brand in personal injury legal services, where I decline the work outright.