Future Enhancement Provision

Support of selling to multiple countries and transacting in their respective currencies is very important even if you are now selling through only one website and currency.

At some point, if you are having great success with your current website, you may decide to market your products in other countries. For SEO and brand positioning reasons, you will have to purchase a new domain and be able to sell in a particular country's local currency..

Though you always have the option to buy a separate license, there are several good reasons why not to take this path. The biggest drawbacks are from management and cost standpoints.

You will need to login and manage everything separately. This will take an enormous amount of your time. Secondly, your affiliate software vendor will charge you at least 50 percent more for every domain that you add.

You will probably start out small, marketing to maybe one or two other countries; but over time, you will want to expand if your marketing plans are successful. You may also want to expand your product line and sell to increasingly more countries. You will subsequently need to sell in additional local currencies and will need additional domains 

Will your affiliate software present a big obstacle to your plans? Before purchasing affiliate marketing software, consider the following points . . 

Can the software accommodate a new domain and sell in different currencies?

Inbuilt support for additional domains is very important even if you are currently selling through only one website. Here is why . . .

As business from your current site grows there's every chance that in the future you'll find a new product line to market that warrants its own new and separate domain name.

Likewise you may well decide to further promote your current site in other countries. For seo and brand positioning reasons you may wish to secure and publish mirror sites under geo-specific domains, .ca or .eu for example, and adapt those sites to price products in the local currency; Canadian Dollars or Euros in the above instances.

If your affiliate software solution fails to support additional domains you will be forced to purchase a new license for each and every new domain you create. Apart from the obvious cost issues the day to day management of affiliate activities on these new sites would become a nightmare requiring a separate login process to access each domain.

 

Can most affiliate marketing software easily handle multiple links and affiliates?

All systems work fine with litle data, but they become slow or unmanageable when there are many domains, links, or affiliates. Forms or reports start taking too long to load and sometimes too much data freezes the browser. Affiliates find it frustrating and annoying to access the information they seek. Their only option is to change their affiliate software. 

Can the software accommodate new product types with an entirely new set of commission structures?

Normally, most affiliate software won't allow setting up more than one parallel product type, an entirely different set of commission structures, or be capable of flexible commission management. However, if you know there is a future possibility that you will add one or more important new product lines, you must check to see if the software you are considering provides these capabilities..

Let 's say you have been selling e-books and have been paying out a 40 to 60 percent commission rate to your affiliates. Now you are also planning to sell printed books. Because selling printed books will not bring in as much profit as selling e-books, you can only pay a 5 to 10 commission rate on these sales.  However, you may want to pay a little higher rate to your premium affiliates. This will be possible only if your affiliate software allows adding parallel product lines. 

Can the software accommodate special affiliate terms that you have devised?

It is likely that you will start with a simple system and because you are new you won't feel comfortable changing the default setting. You may start with one default affiliate group only. However, over time you will have more knowledge and confidence and you may want to target a special group of prospective affiliates and offer a special set of benefits. You may agree to offer additional commissions and benefits only to them with their firm commitment of aggressively promoting your products in a special way.

Since affiliate software is a third party application, it may not always work the way you think. It will only work in the way it was written. It is highly recommended that you check to see whether the affiliate marketing software you are interested in contains the above needed tools for expansion and customization.