In-house affiliate network software?

[Cobo]

Hello all,

I've been trying to gather some reviews and personal experiences with software for an in-house affiliate solution, but all I find dates back to 2009-2010 or before.

We are an intermediary between clients looking for a product and shops that sell. Some of these shops have their own affiliate program and so we subscribe to it, but there are many small online shops that don't (but it's very important for us to have them). Therefore, we are looking for a solution to track sales on all those little shops were we will creating an affiliate program... just for ourselves, to be able to track the conversion from the traffic we derive to them.

We've seen many different possible solutions such as PostAffiliatePro, iDevAffiliate, Euraffiliates, osiaffiliate, etc... Some solutions such as HasOffers (of which people talk wonders) are just too expensive, since we can't afford to pay such a high price for each and every little shop and on a monthly basis.
I've read some bad opinions of PostAffiliatePro being buggy, but again, those were from 2009 and many things may have changed.

We even considered using Google Analytics E-Commerce tracking, but the problem with that is each shop would need to have their Google account and we wouldn't have much control over it (I think). A scenario where a report for each one is set up is feasible but we feel is a lot of trouble dealing with so many different Google accounts. We liked that Google is a recognized provider and people trust them though.

Any links of reviews, personal experiences of yours, or ideas that might help? We're really stuck with this :S.

Thank you!

P.S: Just in case... we need CPA and we can put tracking code on the shops' system as we will be making a contract with them allowing us to.

 

[Linda Buquet]

If I read you correctly and you are the affiliate and are going to try to get merchants to set up an affiliate program just for you, I'm afraid it's not going to work. If they don't already have a program, the extra work of setting one up is not something they can easily be talked into doing. It's a big commitment to set up and manage a program and does not make sense to do it just for one partner.

Trust me when I say even with merchants that already understand the value and WANT and affiliate program - getting them to do the set up on their end is like pushing a rope. If you are having to educate them and talk them into doing it, it's going to be a very frustrating journey for you I'm afraid.

 

[Cobo]

Hello Linda,

Thank you for answering, having an aswer from someone with your experience is truly great.

Regarding my problem: no, we would set it up for them, precisely because of that... because it would be just for us. So we would achieve having more shops in our site, which is part of our value, and they would win being able to appear on it and having us directing traffic to them. I guess in this case we are both the affiliate and the "network"... all four ourselves.

As we would have access and we would be the ones doing the set up, is it to naive to think problems will be low? Would it be too much to maintain so many small shops which may or may not give us much revenue?
The final idea would be to hire an expert who could do the set ups for us everytime we need to add a shop and for all the support regarding this.

From your experience, is the idea too crazy?

Thank you so much for sharing all your knowledge.

Cheers!