URL

http://www.marketingtips.com/assoctrac/

Company:

Cory Rudl, Internet Marketing Center, Blaine, Washington

Software Type:

ASP (Application Service Provider), fee-based

Affiliate/Merchant Web Interface

Yes

Pricing:

$347 plus $35/month service fee

Commission:

No

Affiliate Marketing & Recruitment:

No

Tracks:

Sales

Two-Tier:

Customize individual payment rate:

Carts that support:

Designed to easily work with any shopping cart, any e-commerce system, and any secure server.

Payment Systems

N/A

Writes checks to Affiliates:

No. But payments due are exported, and may be imported to QuickBooks, where checks can be written automatically.

Data Export:

Yes.

Affiliate ID generation:

Yes, automatic.

Banner/graphic management:

Short, newsletter-friendly affiliate URLs.

E-mail to affiliate after each order

Yes

Send e-mail to affiliates:

Not directly from the program, but from data files you can download.

Affiliate sign-up:

Automated

Redirects to particular pages:

Average Survey Rating:

8

Number of Respondents:

4

Positives:

It does everything I need: online stats for affiliates; paying affiliates is easy... even downloads to QuickBooks to print checks; emails affiliates with personalization information inserted; etc. Oh yeah... IT'S CHEAP!

Tracking features that will ensure affiliate is paid for effort. Both cookies and database tracking. Cory's guide that comes with the package is fantastic! I am in the process of a step by step implementation.

Manager interface, reasonably reliable, offered by a company that built their business through their affiliate program.

Great

Negatives:

Limitations on how items are entered in the database. Must be done using the site shopping cart. Very tedious for a site that has 400+ items. I must pay affiliates based on each item, not a uniform flat rate of the sales. This means each item must be individually entered. And they only accept the "Sales Price" and no other method of calculating commissions. I have chosen to pay based on gross profit per item, the only feasible way to have a site that is fair to the affiliate and pay a very good rate. A simple database modification would allow an option by the user to pay based on one of several methods.

Affiliates stat page is not very robust, affiliates not able to track different campaigns, if their server goes down our affiliate network goes down, not able to set up individual affiliates with different commission payouts, have serious concerns about its ability to properly track sales - I estimate 15% to 20% of sales are not properly credited to affiliates based on tests performed which if affiliates knew would cause an uproar but there is nothing that can be done since the software does not properly track sales for numerous reasons.

Some problems in managing European currencies

Purchase Again?

Absolutely I would purchase it again.

Yes. Even through tedious to load, the support is fantastic, and help is available in real time, not just on the telephone. The people are top notch.

Possibly, I would seriously consider the other server and client side options including Paul Galloway's server side software and My Affiliate Program client side solution (would not consider a network like CJ).

Maybe

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