ShareASale Affiliates a Polarizing Love Hate War

By | December 16, 2015

ShareASale

The ShareASale affiliate program is very popular and widely used and today I will be analyzing this program. Anyone who has ever asked yourself, “How can I make money online?”, should read this article.

shareasale

ShareASale Affiliate Program

ShareASale is a large Affiliate Marketing Network. They have over 3,900 merchants participating in their network and have been in business for over 15 years. Their goal, which is posted on their website is “We strive to deliver the best product in the industry, and support it with superior customer service provided by people that will follow up, call back, and provide real solutions.”

Due to the combination of a large merchant network, a long business history and good tools has led ShareSale to be one of the most broadly used affiliate programs for bloggers, internet marketers, and online business owners. mThink has ShareASale in the top 10 affiliate networks and gives them a positive review. According to mThink:

“Always a contender, ShareASale seems to polarize opinions a little more than some other networks. A stable network with a solid history.”

Another reason ShareASale is popular is the large number of merchants Affiliate Marketers have to select from at

shareasale-features

Additional Features for ShareASale

ShareASale. With 3,900 merchants from which to select, you can find products for any niche. Deep links or affiliate links that go directly to a specific product are easy to create on ShareASale and over 2,ooo merchants have datafeeds to allow for products to be easily found.

ShareASale Features

Given all of this, if you are involved with affiliate marketing will benefit by being aware of ShareASale, the tools it offers, the large number of merchants how it works and how you get paid.

Why Wouldn’t People Want to Participate in ShareASale?

  • There are very many individual merchants to deal with as compared to Amazon where you only deal with one.
  • If you examine many online reviews of ShareASale the reviewers seem to be evenly split at both ends of the spectrum. People either love them or hate them with very few people in the middle. Opinions usually fall into the normal bell curves with most being somewhere in the middle. It is unusual to see such polarization and contrasting opinions.

    bell-curves

    Bell Curve Examples

  • Reports of merchants not paying commissions due to affiliates.
    • Complaints about non-payment are not uncommon which may explain the polarization above. I was not able to determine if this was from  certain problem merchants

How Much Does ShareASale Pay?

ShareASale’s merchants each set their own percentage of the item’s sale price. In my review I saw percentages from 4% to 20% from various merchants. A sample is below, I am not going to include all 3,900.

MerchantCategoryFees
FanaticsSports Team Gear10%
Rent the RunwayFashion7%
One Kings LaneHousehold Furnishing Accessories20%
Mid ClothFashion7%
Entirely PetsPets6%

 

Example of Fees

The fee for the merchant One Kings Lane is 20%. The average purchase is $250, so the average commission or referral fee is $250 x 20% = $50.

Using this example, if on your site you promoted One Kings Lane’s products and made one sale per week. You would bring in $250 x 20% x 52 = $2,600 annually. Continue blogging away and promoting cleverly and grow it to one sale a day and your earnings would be $250 x $25 x 365 = $18,250 annually.

The point I am trying to make is that  your affiliate fees get larger and larger as your site develops and increasing numbers of visitors arrive.

Read my recommendation for how to get started becoming an affiliate today for free.

 

Tools and Support

ShareASale  it’s affiliates to be successful. They have a lot of tools available for affiliates. You can get product links for all the products on their site once you are an affiliate. They also have coupons you can offer, banners and an interesting tool called video creatives.

shareasale-tools-and-support

ShareASale Tools & Support

You can also get the HTML code for banners and images for many products.

shareasale-banner-1

ShareASale Banners

It is all provided to you. You can promote products as many merchants and their products as you want.

How Do I Get Started as an Affiliate for Free?

ShareASale Recommendation: Positive

As I explored more and more to evaluate the ShareASale haters it seemed that there were perhaps more problems for affiliates outside of North America and with a few merchants. Perhaps the merchant screening process should be more selective. Anyway, there are too many happy users who have been using ShareASale for years and too many reputable merchants here to discount.

I Don’t Know How to Get Started

If you don’t know how to get started at no cost, please read my post that talks about my recommendation on how to start, where to get all of the specific training and guidance you need to succeed..

As always, if you have any questions or comments, please leave them in the comments section below. I really like to get feedback on improving my posts or to fill in something I inadvertently left out or failed to explain sufficiently..

Sincerely,

Xin

4 thoughts on “ShareASale Affiliates a Polarizing Love Hate War

  1. Garen

    I have been using ShareASale for about 6 years now. They have lots of great affiliate programs in various niches. What I tend to do is start out with ShareASale and then once I get so many sales with a merchant they usually give you a pay increase to be in their in-house affiliate program. The reason they pay more is because they have to pay a percentage to ShareASale and with their in-house program they don’t need to pay that anymore.

    Reply
    1. Xin Zhang Post author

      Hello Garen,

      It is good to hear that you have been using ShareAsale for six years. There are quite a few people who are happy with them and others who are not. Quite a polarized set of opinions if you research people’s reviews. It is interesting that merchants will upgrade you to their higher commission in-house programs after you have some sales. that is something good to know.

      Thanks for the excellent information.

      Sincerely,

      Xin

      Reply
      1. Garen

        From what you have seen what are the pros and cons of them? I know they are kind of slow for payouts, but my ultimate goal is to get in their inhouse programs :)

        Reply
        1. Xin Zhang Post author

          Hello Garen,

          From all the research I have done the pros would be that there are a great number of merchants in the program and many people have done business with them for years and are very happy. The cons would be that it seems there may be some problem merchants who don’t always pay. I believe this is why there are so many happy people writing positive reviews and a number of unhappy people who are writing negative reviews.

          I would look for merchants who have been in the program for a while and perhaps only test some of the newer ones until they prove themselves. If you can graduate into the merchants in-house affiliate programs that pay higher commissions that is a bonus.

          Please let me know if you have additional questions.

          Sincerely,

          Xin

          Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *