Every business needs marketing to stay alive. People won’t know about your business if they don’t see it.
After you set up your Shopify store, you’ll have to figure out how to let people know you’re here and have things to sell.
Most business owners will use advertising, but many don’t know that this is expensive.
In some cases, it’s a waste of money because you have to pay for each click, even if no sale comes from it.
Affiliate marketing is the other thing you can do. It’s a way for other people to sell your products, and when they do, they get a cut of each sale.
We’ll look at the seven best Shopify apps that you can use to get this program started.
Join the OSI
With OSI Affiliate, you can get your customers to tell their friends about your business. In exchange, they get paid. Your customer will have a link that they can share on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
You can give coupon codes to your customers and people who have a lot of influence. They will have to tell their networks about this promo code. This promo code will also tell the system where the sale from the referral came from.
There are three price points for OSI. These things:
- Simple – $47 a month
- Professional – $97 a month
- The monthly premium is $247.
Here’s what you’d get with the Basic plan:
- 20,000 links or requests to track
- Up to 200 publicists
- Getting paid over and over
- List of directories
- Sharing in a group
- Feedback poll
For the Professional plan, you get everything in the Basic plan and more.
- You can get up to 500,000 requests to track.
- No more than 1,000 partners
- A page that says “thank you” after a customer has bought something.
- Pop-ups that appear when a customer is about to leave a site are a great way to get them to buy something, even if they don’t want to.
- Opt-in forms: You can make pop-up opt-in forms to get customer information so you can send them marketing materials.
- Integrations: You can connect the system to other software, like your autoresponder.
The Premium plan has the same benefits as the Professional plan, but you can have up to 1 million tracking requests and up to 5,000 affiliates.
All of the plans are free to set up, and your affiliate links can use your own domain name.
Affiliatly
Affiliatly is an alternative to LeadDyno that costs less.
It’s not one of the free affiliate marketing apps in the system, but you can try it out for free for 30 days. After that, it costs $16 per month.
It keeps track of all orders that come from your affiliate’s links, whether they are made on a computer or a phone. Its main benefit is that your affiliates can sell your products with the help of coupon codes, QR codes, email, and SKU numbers.
It also has four plans, with the main difference being the number of affiliates who can join your program.
The prices and the number of online marketers who can sign up for each package are listed below.
- Starter costs $16/50,
- Advanced costs $24/200,
- PRO 1000 costs $59/1,000
- PRO UNLIMITED costs $129/unlimited.
As you can see, you only want to move to the higher tiers if you have a lot of affiliates making sales for you. If not, it’s better to keep the price low and get rid of marketers who don’t do their jobs.
No matter which package you choose, you’ll get all of the following.
- Admin and affiliate panels should be kept apart
- All kinds of ways to track sales, including QR codes, coupons, links, emails, and more.
- Orders that have been filled will be updated automatically
- You have full control over how much your affiliates earn. If an order is returned, you can pay them a partial commission or none at all.
- Full control over which products can be sold for commissions
- Affiliates can choose how they make money: by clicks or by sales.
One thing to note is that the app can be used in more than one language. The only catch is that the only way to pay is through PayPal.
Refersion
Refersion is an affiliate marketing program for Shopify where you can also ask influential people to join.
Refersion works best for businesses that work with people who have a lot of followers on social media.
The service costs $89 per month, and you can only try the app for free for 14 days. The other package is a service for the whole business, but the price is set by what you need.
These are the things you would get for $89:
- Access to a list of influential people who can help sell your products; More than 5,000 partners work with Refersion to help you make sales.
- No more than 130 orders from affiliates per month.
- Unlimited unique visitors to your online store
- There is no limit to how many affiliates can sell your products.
- Each affiliate marketer has their own dashboard.
Refersion has a database of people who have a lot of influence, but it also has an automatic coupon generator. Affiliates can make coupons from their admin panels, and once you give them the green light, customers will be able to use them in your Shopify store.
Basically, your affiliates are making new discounts for you to use in your marketing. All you have to do is give your OK. You don’t have to change anything in your Shopify admin panel, and they don’t have to either. The coupon will be automatically added by the system.
Refersion also lets you decide how much commission each product costs.
Some apps for affiliate marketing only let you pay commissions based on how many sales you make. Here, you can set a percentage for each type of product so that you don’t lose money on cheap ones.
Enlistly
Enlistly is one of those affiliate marketing apps that is free, but only for a short time. The free trial only lasts for 14 days, after which you’ll have to pay $14 per month to keep using the service.
Enlistly is an easy-to-use tool, and the people who made it have kept the features to a minimum.
You get the following services and abilities for $14:
- Orders can be tracked automatically by affiliate.
- Reports on traffic, analytics, and sales
- Dashboard for managing invoices and affiliates
- The app has a chat system that makes it easy for people to talk to you.
- All of your affiliates will be able to use media and banners that you upload.
Like the other apps, Enlistly gives you, as the manager, and each affiliate their own dashboard. They can only see how well they are doing, but you can keep track of the group’s sales records as a whole.
Affiliate Network for E-Commerce
This is one of Shopify’s few free apps for affiliate marketing. The only package is the one that is free. With E-Commerce (ECA), you can get the basic features of an affiliate marketing platform as well as access to its database of affiliate marketers.
The thing that makes this company stand out is that it has a network of more than 20,000 affiliates. You can also be featured in the company’s newsletter, where you can let marketers know that you have a commission program.
Here are the most important things you can do with this app:
- You can invite up to 15 influencers per month. These people come from a list of marketers in ECA’s database.
- You can have as many affiliates as you want per month.
- Add yourself to the company’s list of products. Even if you don’t invite them, influential people can look at this database and promote you if they like what they see.
- Support is available for seven days through email, phone, and live chat.
You will have your own dashboard where you can see how each of your affiliates is doing. All in all, ECA has a simple affiliate program and software for managing it.
It’s best for people who are just starting out and want to test the waters, especially those who aren’t ready to sign up for a monthly plan.
Even though it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, the fact that it’s free makes up for that. Use this app to learn how affiliate marketing works, and then move on to better apps later.
Referrals and Affiliates
This app isn’t free, but it only costs $9 per month, which isn’t much. You can try out the free version for five days. The leveling system is a feature of this Shopify app for affiliate marketing that you won’t find in many others.
With the leveling system, you can set up an affiliate network for multi-level marketing. You can set up as many as three levels, with the highest commission going to the first level. You can also decide how much of a commission each level gets.
Here’s what I mean:
- Level 1 – 20% commission
- Level 2 – 10% commission
- Level 3 – 5% commission
If an affiliate at Level 1 sold a product, he would get a 20% commission. The Level 1 affiliate can get another affiliate to join, who will be his downline or Level 2. Level 2 would get a 20% commission if he sold the product, while Level 1 would get 10%, even if he didn’t do the marketing himself.
Here are some of the other things the app can do:
- Each affiliate in an MLM affiliate marketing system has its own dashboard.
- You can send a single message to all of your members at once using bulk email.
- Use PayPal to pay fees.
- Making it easier to share on social media sites
You can sign up as many affiliate members as you can with this app. Each member can also choose how much he or she needs to make before they get paid. Most importantly, your affiliates will love how long the cookies last.
This means that they will get a cut of all sales from the same customer.
ShoutOut
This is the last Shopify affiliate marketing app on our list. You can try Shout Out for free for 14 days, but it costs $39 per month. This app is so good that social media stars like Kylie Jenner and others use it.
Like the last app, ShoutOut puts a lot of emphasis on the MLM model. It lets you set up an affiliate marketing program with multiple levels, so that downlines can sell and earn commissions, and uplines can also earn even if they don’t make any sales.
Here are some of the best things about the app:
- Unlimited MLM: You can make as many levels and MLM programs as you need for your marketing strategy.
- Unlimited affiliates: You can sign up as many partners as you want, and there are no limits on how many links you can make for each new member.
- Coupons: You can make coupons in the app and give your affiliates the code. They can use this to advertise the products, and the discounts will be taken care of automatically.
- No limits on orders. Unlike some other Shopify affiliate marketing apps, this one doesn’t put a limit on how many orders you can pay commissions on.
PayPal is a payment system that you can use to pay out commissions. You can pay in more than 180 different currencies, which means you can ask people from all over the world to sell your goods.
You can also import your affiliates from other apps, like Klaviyo and MailChimp, into this one. And most importantly, the company gives you a free video course on affiliate marketing that will teach you how it works and what strategies you can use to be successful.
LeadDyno
LeadDyno is one of the best affiliate marketing apps for Shopify right now. Its main benefits are easy integration and many ways to pay.
The basic package of the app costs $29 per month, so you have to pay to use it. Depending on the features you want to use, you may have to pay extra fees.
Even though it costs money, you can try it out for free for 30 days.
During this time, you can test the app and see how well it fits your affiliate marketing goals.
You can do the following with LeadDyno:
- Individual affiliate dashboard
- Features that make it easy for your affiliates to sell, like links that can be shared on social media,
- Tracking of commissions in real time
- Affiliates can easily promote your products while on the go with a mobile app that doesn’t require them to log in to a web dashboard.
- There are many ways to pay, like PayPal, Dwolla, and Coinbase.
- Free membership to LeadDyno’s affiliate marketing network, where you can find business partners, learn from them, and talk with them.
- Support for the U.S. business time zone seven days a week
You can choose from one of four main packages. Every package is paid for every month.
The prices are listed below, along with the most unique visitors it can handle per month.
- Starter – $29 / 1,000
- Biz Builder – $49 / 3,000
- Accelerator – $79 / 7,500
- Rainmaker – $149 / 25,000
All packages let you have as many affiliates as you want, but only the Accelerator package gives you 1:1 and live chat support.
Summary
Most of the best affiliate marketing apps for Shopify don’t come for free. You might run into a few here and there, but you’ll notice right away that they don’t have all the services you need to run your business.
If you’re new to drop shipping, your main goal should be to choose products that sell well. The next step is to find people who will sell your products and bring people to your Shopify store. You can do this with the help of affiliate marketing apps.
With these apps, you use a commission-based business model that has been around for a long time. The only difference is that you don’t sell the products yourself; instead, you use other people’s skills. In return, you pay them based on how well their marketing works.
Affiliate marketing is a great way for both you and the affiliate marketers to make money.