Q: I’m looking for the best company who can offer us all the stuff needed to run an affiliate program. We need the hosting, the buying form, the credit card processor, the control panel for affiliates, and the affiliates pay out. I think CCBill does it all, but I cannot find any other company. Do you know any?
A: While it sounds attractive to have an all in one solution, it’s not necessarily the best or most cost efficient.
There are a handful of solutions out there that fit the bill, such as ClickBank and PayLoadz. In the case of these two, they are only available to sell digital products.
Personally, I look at the all in one solutions as being the affiliate marketing equivalent to those combination machines that print, copy, fax and scan. Yeah, they do it all, but they don’t do any of these functions great.
There are a handful of affiliate program tracking technologies I would recommend, including Commission Junction, LinkShare, and ShareASale.
I would suggest going with one of these companies and then getting your own merchant account to process the credit cards.
If you go with an affiliate marketing company that doesn’t handle check cutting to affiliates, or you would prefer to handle it yourself for some reason, you can go with a payroll company like ADP or Paychex.