We are down to three finalists for our particular needs: All Affiliate Pro, DirectTrack and iDevAffiliates. Anybody had experience of using one or other of these packages? What did you think of it? Any other robust, top quality scripts that people would recommend? Thank you
I have only heard great things about Direct Track from many large companies who use it. The only bad thing I heard about it was that it is kinda expensive...
I don't like its interface and i just don't know i don't like it . Direct track is a good software but as bjgolf said its expensive.
Azam, I would suggest building your own platform to be perfectly honest. I worked with one of the products you listed for over a year and a half. There were too many issues and outages to make it worthwhile. Also, many publishers are apprehensive to use a program based on this company’s platform. With that said, this is why LeadFlash built their own platform from the ground up ...It is night and day! I am thankful the LF went that route. Our publishers are grateful as well. If you want specifics, hit me up on IM. -=Chipmunk=-
Good advice chipmunk... but I think that would not be a challenge that I'd be willing to take. One of the clients I consult for (a network) has been developing their own affiliate platform and it has involved nearly two years of burning the midnight oil. The amount of problems they've had have been phenomenal. We need a script for an individual program, so it's not worth the hassle of developing a script ourselves from scratch I think. For a network such as yours, I think have your own inhouse software is, indeed, better than DirectTrack etc. You say you've used the products I've listed. Could you please give your opinion on All Affiliate Pro, DirectTrack and iDevAffiliates? THANK YOU!
Azam, As I indicated, I have used one of the products mentioned for an extended amount of time. I would be happy to take a moment and chat on IM …rather than be critical of it in an open forum. -=Chipmunk=-
While I don't have a favorite tracking program to recommend right now, I STRONGLY recommend NOT trying to build a homegrown solution for a couple reasons. 1) Affiliate trust - too many merchants before you have built their own software that didn't track and didnt work well. 2) Affiliate ease of use - it's much easier for affiliates to log in and use a couple programs they are familiar with. If 100 merchants they partner with each had their own software it would be a nightmare to get anything done. 3) There's no way you can build in all the features and the type of interface that a tried a proven software program with years on the market, thousands of affiliates and hundreds of merchants providing feedback and several versions of improvements. At least you couldn't do it quickly and have a solid version affiliates could trust right out of the gate. You certainly could not do it if you are new to the game and understand much about affiliate programs. (Maybe for a network like LeadFlash is makes sense.) All that said, one other I have heard good things about is GroundBreak affiliate software. Very reasonable too. However my very best recommendation is to go with ShareaSale - a network. All around for a variety of reasons it's the best option right now. The biggest reason being lots of the strong affiliates are there and love that network. You want lots of good affiliates? Go where they are and give them what they want! ie. Solid tracking with a trusted network that offers consolidated payments and tracking.
Have you looked into Post Affiliate pro at Quality Unit? I used this program for a while on an old site and was very pleased with it. Not sure of it's "condition" now, though. Jim
Thanks for the wonderful advice on the phone Michael (Chipmunk). Linda - I would agree with you. I think it's one thing for a network to develop their own technology, but probably overkill for a merchant to do so (unless they are size of Amazon). SAS are my favourite USA network too, but unfortunately this client is a UK one. Jim - thanks for the advice about Post Affiliate Pro. Yes, looked into it, but they don't have the features we need.
I tried All Affiliate Pro but customer service was v. slow and it stopped working. I'm wondering if an in-house would be more reliable.
Shelley, it appears from your message count that you signed up to this forum and replied to this then 4 year old thread, just to attack our company. I've seen you do it on other forums and I have to say your actions really aren't fair and I'll explain to everyone why. There are some important things that anyone considering setting up an affiliate program can learn from this example. On the 16th October 2007 Shelley placed an order for AllAffiliatePro for her site TeachingEnglishGames. She ordered the Software:Basic package which meant we installed the software on her hosting, and integrated with her shopping cart to track sales. Shelly didn't have a shopping cart, or order form. Instead there were various buy now buttons dotted about the place. We told her that we can integrate with these, but each time she added a new one it would need code added to it. It would probably be worth adding a shopping cart of order form, then we'd only need to integrate in one place. After looking into it Shelly decided to do this and found an Indian company to create an order form with PayPal Website Payments Pro. That took a long time for them to set up. During this time Shelley had a lot of questions about the affiliate software and how it worked, most of which were answered same day, a few the day after. When it was done we took a look at it, and advised Shelly that they really should have an SSL certificate now that they were taking card details on their site. When I tested out the order form there were lots of PHP errors, which I forwarded to her. Happy with the extra advice and help we were giving with her troublesome Indian order form, Shelly decided to upgrade to our advanced package. We proceeded to install the software. One of Shelley's emails from this period contained: "Please can you take a back up of your changes because the people updating the script to get rid of that error message are not very competent, and I won't be using them again."When we came to integrate it was clear that the Indian company (or Indian school boy for all we knew) really didn't know much about code. No wonder things had taken so long. We exchanged some emails with them about integration and what we were doing. We clearly marked up our code changes to their order form. Shelley tested and it wasn't working. I took a closer look myself. They had variables declared such as $orderID, that they were passing to PayPal, but they never actually contained anything. This was very concerning, but we hadn't been hired to fix the Indian order form. I told Shelley about the issue and applied a work around. I tested myself by placing an order. The tracking was working. I notified Shelley, she refunded my test order and placed one of her own, confirming that the tracking was working. She was still concerned about the Indian order form working properly: "OK thanks for the detective work. I refunded you. When you ordered you did not have any trouble getting to the download page right? Great - that's really exciting to be able to start!"With everything finished Shelley was good to go. She had some affiliates sign up. Saw one of them send a sale and it tracked in the software so she was good... Or so we thought... 3 years later we got a very angry email from Shelley. She proclaimed our affiliate software had stopped working. The most common issue when an old customer contacts us to say the software is no longer working, is that they've moved hosting and simply copy/pasted the affiliate software over to the new one. This of course doesn't work as the database needs to be copied over, and the configuration changed to match the new server. When this happens and people get in touch we help they reinstall to the new hosting and get the software working again... But this wasn't the case here. I logged into Shelley's affiliate program and it was all functioning properly. Shelley hadn't moved servers. She was angry because the software had stopped tracking sales. We checked the error logs, the sales tracking script wasn't being called any more, and it had been like this for a long time. From our perspective, unfortunately there is nothing we could have done to prevent this. We delivered everything outlined in our package. The software was running on Shelley's own server, after the set up we no longer had access to the server. I confirmed myself the tracking was working, Shelley confirmed this, and the tracked genuine affiliate sale soon after confirmed it as well. We were not managing the affiliate program for Shelley, were not contracted or paid to login and monitor it, we were not on any ongoing commission. Unfortunately, we, or any other affiliate software provider or network, do not have any control over our customers sites. We can't stop them, or one of their 3rd party contractors, from editing their site and removing our tracking code. I can understand why Shelley was very upset, I would have been too, but her anger has been unfortunately misdirected onto us, rather than whomever removed the tracking code. Most site owners are familiar with Google analytics. Imagine if you install the GA tracking code on your site, view the stats and see it's working. Then later remove the tracking code, and see that the stats are no longer showing. Would it be fair to complain to Google that their analytics are broken? This complaint against us is the same thing. No matter who provides your affiliate software, or whether you go on a network, it's vital to ensure that no one who subsequently works on your site removes the affiliate sales tracking code. On a network they may well notice, after all, they are on commission and it's in their interest to see sales tracking. On an in-house program that you are managing yourself, it can only be your own responsibility. For the sake of your affiliates, be sure the code is in place and functioning properly. Shelley, if you read this. I hope you understand. If this was in any way our fault I'd happily (or unhappily) hold my hand up and admit we messed up, but if I said that here I would be lying. Despite your attacks on us, I'm still prepared to help you out, and get your affiliate program restarted. If you get in touch I'm happy to talk to you on the phone and go over everything. But please understand that this wasn't anything that we could control, your anger shouldn't be directed at us. Lyle