How to Start a BigCommerce Affiliate Program

Affiliate programs are great ways to spread awareness of your brand’s products or services. A BigCommerce affiliate program can help your brand reach broader audiences and access higher commission opportunities. 

Thousands of new stores are added to the BigCommerce platform each year, with the platform having just under 50,000 active stores. As of 2022 (to date), 5,144 new stores have opened. 

This article will explore how to use BigCommerce and one of its most helpful and accurate affiliate tracking integrations, Tapfiliate, to your brand and affiliate partners’ advantage. 

What is BigCommerce?

BigCommerce is a premium-hosted eCommerce solution. Business owners with small, mid-size, or large companies can set up their online stores on the platform. 

BigCommerce facilitates multi-channel retailing, allowing companies to sell on multiple platforms and marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Instagram, and others in addition to their website.

The platform is distinguished from other e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento, or WooCommerce by its extensive feature set, scalability, and ease of use. 

What is Affiliate Marketing in BigCommerce? 

Understanding what affiliate marketing means in the context of BigCommerce involves looking at some key features. 

As you may already know, affiliate marketing involves promoting or having affiliate partners promote a brand’s products to various audiences. The brand receives more business, and the partners receive a commission based on the specific program or platform agreements. 

Affiliate marketing plays a vital role in BigCommerce. Starting a BigCommerce affiliate program allows you to collaborate with influencers, content creators, and other businesses. Not only does this increase brand visibility, but it also boosts sales growth while keeping marketing expenses linked to performance indicators.

Take your affiliate program to new heights 👉 sign up to Tapfiliate today

Benefits of Having a BigCommerce Affiliate Program for Brands

Many benefits come from having your brand use BigCommerce for affiliate marketing: 

• Numerous affiliate tracking and management systems can be seamlessly integrated with BigCommerce. 
• A BigCommerce affiliate program helps increase your products’ visibility in search engine results because they’re built with SEO in mind. 
• The affiliate program integrations BigCommerce offers enable tracking commissions, referrals, and success metrics. Influencer partnerships can increase a brand’s legitimacy and connect with potential consumers using reliable voices.

We will dive into some of the main advantages of using Tapfiliate alongside the eCommerce giant.

Tapfiliate integrates smoothly with BigCommerce, providing a suite of features to increase the efficiency and efficacy of an affiliate program. By combining Tapfiliate and BigCommerce, brands can reap several benefits that contribute to the success of their affiliate marketing initiatives. 

These benefits include: 

Increased Sales

Typically, affiliates use a variety of platforms to advertise products, such as blogs, social media, and email newsletters. Improved sales via these channels raise awareness and familiarity of a brand. 

By producing content centered around your goods or services, affiliates broaden your brand’s audience and attract potential customers.

Tapfiliate ensures that affiliate sales are accurately tracked back to the source, ensuring that affiliates receive appropriate commissions, which is critical for maintaining partner trust in a brand.

Broader Reach 

Affiliates have pre-existing audiences, loyal social media followers, blog readers, or email subscribers. Brands can reach these diverse audiences—many of whom might not have been accessible through traditional marketing channels—by collaborating with various affiliates. 

If a firm specializes in fitness items, it can collaborate with fitness bloggers, influencers, or social media celebrities with a large following interested in health and wellness. 

This specialization enables the company to expose its items to a specific audience already engaged and interested in similar offerings.

Cost-Effective 

Affiliate marketing is performance-based; brands only pay for tangible outcomes (like sales or leads) instead of just possible exposure. 

Using affiliates to increase brand awareness is a very economical tactic. Increased brand exposure is achieved without the high upfront costs of other forms of advertising, guaranteeing that marketing costs produce concrete, immediate results.

Brands manage their program using built-in tools and plugins, like Tapfiliate’s affiliate program management features, eliminating the need for expensive software or infrastructure.

Improved SEO 

An affiliate marketing campaign can produce backlinks that improve a brand’s search engine optimization (SEO). Reputable websites that link back to a brand’s website can raise the site’s authority and search engine ranking, which increases its reach and visibility organically. 

Through Tapfiliate, brands can harness partners’ social media presence to amplify their content and increase organic engagement, resulting in improved SEO performance.

Tapfiliate can track content performance, helping brands determine which types of content and platforms produce the best results.

Brand Advocacy

Affiliates who join a brand’s program are motivated by a genuine belief in the brand’s products or services. 

Personal recommendations are more likely to be trusted than conventional advertising. By endorsing a brand to its audience, affiliates give it legitimacy and effectively recommend the company’s goods or services. 

Potential customers’ perceptions of the brand’s reliability and credibility can be improved by this endorsement, increasing the likelihood that they will purchase.

Data Insights 

Affiliate marketing platforms offer comprehensive information on affiliates’ performance, including clicks, conversions, sales, and commission payments. 

By analyzing this data, brands can determine which products are best sellers, which affiliates generate the most revenue, and what kinds of promotions or content get the most engagement. 

Using the Tapfiliate integration, users can further explore the quality and helpful insights curated to their custom data analytics that the platform’s real-time reporting feature provides.

Scalability 

Affiliates actively contribute to the brand’s reach expansion because they are motivated to maximize their earnings. Growth depends on this scalability, which enables brands to modify their affiliate plans in response to opportunities and market demands.

Using Tapfiliate’s scalable partner solution that can handle an increasing number of affiliates and higher sales volumes without sacrificing performance, brands on BigCommerce can continue to grow their affiliate program, reaching new audiences and increasing sales over time.

How to Set Up Your Affiliate Program on BigCommerce

Setting up your brand’s affiliate program on BigCommerce is simple. Here is a comprehensive step-by-step guide to help you navigate the platform. 

Define Your Affiliate Program Structure

Clearly define your affiliate program’s structure before integrating any tools. Select the commission rates, terms of payment, and any incentives based on performance. 

Choose the actions that will bring in commissions (clicks, sales, leads, etc.) and the commission structure (fixed, percentage, or tiered rates) that best suits your brand’s objectives. 

Choose an Affiliate Tracking Platform

It’s essential to choose the correct affiliate tracking platform. Tapfiliate is a popular option because of its extensive tracking capabilities, simplicity of BigCommerce integration, and many features to manage and expand affiliate programs effectively. 

Integrate Tapfiliate with BigCommerce

It’s easy to integrate BigCommerce with Tapfiliate. To connect the two platforms, use BigCommerce’s API and Tapfiliate’s integration guides. 

With this setup, you can monitor affiliate commissions, sales, and referrals straight from your BigCommerce store, guaranteeing precise and timely reporting. 

Create Promotional Materials

Provide a promotional package that affiliates can use to advertise your goods. Email templates, banner ads, social media posts, and product photos can all fall under this category. 

Top-notch, brand-consistent resources make it easier for affiliates to market your goods, which raises the chance that successful referrals will be made. 

Build an Affiliate Recruitment Page

Make a page on your website specifically for affiliate recruitment. This page should include information on how to sign up, the commission schedule, and the advantages of your affiliate program. 

Ensure it’s simple to use and offers Tapfiliate users an easy-to-follow application process. 

Recruit Affiliates

Once everything is set up, begin enlisting affiliates. Advertise your affiliate program on your website, in pertinent online communities, and on social media platforms. 

Another option is directly communicating with bloggers, influencers, and content producers who share your vision and target market. 

Provide Training and Resources

When affiliates sign up for your program, provide them with the tools and training they need to succeed. These can include product promotion how-to manuals, affiliate marketing best practices, and pointers on content optimization for conversions. 

Providing affiliates with regular updates regarding new product launches, promotions, and program modifications can also help maintain their interest. 

Recognize and Reward Success

Establish a system to identify and compensate your most prosperous affiliates. Increased commission rates, rewards for exceeding sales goals, or public acknowledgment can be included in this method. 

Affiliates are motivated when their efforts are acknowledged, and it also builds loyalty and promotes continued performance. 

Stay Flexible

Be ready to modify your affiliate program as the market and your company grows. Review the effectiveness of your program regularly, get affiliate feedback, and keep up with the latest developments in affiliate marketing. Being adaptable enables you to make the required changes to your program, guaranteeing its success and growth in the future.

What Features Should You Look for in an Affiliate Management App or Software for BigCommerce?

Deciding on what affiliate management software your business wants to use can seem daunting. We have narrowed down the important features you can look for in Tapfiliate, one of the most popular affiliate management tools that works well with BigCommerce. 

Easy Integration with BigCommerce

Affiliate management programs and software created for BigCommerce provide easy connection with the platform. 

Tapfiliate integrates seamlessly with BigCommerce, making it simple for brands to set up and administer affiliate programs from the BigCommerce dashboard. The platform includes simple integration tools or plugins that facilitate the setup process, delivering a smooth and efficient experience for brands. 

Tracking and Management

Tapfiliate makes this process easier with its robust affiliate tracking. The platform excels at tracking online and offline sales through links and coupons and can also track non-cookie-based conversions.

Real-Time Reporting and Analytics

The Tapfiliate dashboard provides brands with comprehensive and accurate statistics and metrics, allowing them to examine the effectiveness of their affiliate program in real-time and make data-driven marketing decisions on the go.

Customizable Commission Structures

These apps encourage brands to tailor commission structures for their affiliate programs based on their needs and goals. 

For example, Tapfiliate allows users to choose between commission structures that suit their brand needs. Their recurring commission structure is ideal for SaaS and subscription platforms where affiliates can continue earning for as long as there are subscribers. 

Users can also explore their extra commission, fixed or percentage-based commissions, and lifetime commission options. 

Brands can use the platform to design commission rates, set performance incentives, and alter compensation tiers to reward affiliates and maximize ROI.

Marketing Tools for Affiliates

Affiliate management software means you can provide marketing tools and resources for affiliates to promote a brand’s products and services. 

Partners can access promotional assets from the Tapfiliate interface. This feature allows them to construct attractive marketing campaigns and drive the brand’s website traffic.

Fraud Detection and Prevention

Nearly all of these platforms use advanced fraud detection and prevention methods to protect brands’ affiliate programs from fraudulent activity and misuse. 

Tapfiliate includes advanced features to detect and prevent fraudulent activity within an affiliate program. Maintaining the affiliate program’s integrity and ensuring that commissions are only paid for legitimate sales is crucial. 

User-Friendly Affiliate Portal

The affiliate portal provides a consolidated platform for affiliates to participate in the program, streamlining the affiliate experience and increasing partner engagement and loyalty.

Tapfiliate also provides a user-friendly affiliate portal through which affiliates may sign up, receive marketing materials, track performance, and manage their accounts. 

Customer Support and Training

Dedicated customer assistance and training tools to assist companies and affiliates in their affiliate networks are vital. Brands can access extensive documentation, tutorials, and instructions within the app or software platform. 

Brands and affiliates can also rely on responsive customer support teams to help with technical issues, debugging, and best practices.

When it comes to specialized customer support to assist brands and affiliates with any questions, difficulties, or concerns that may arise, Tapfiliate’s support crew is prompt and competent, offering email, live chat, or phone assistance, depending on the package.

Compliance and Regulation

These platforms have built-in procedures that allow affiliates to disclose their link with the brand while marketing products or services, guaranteeing transparency and compliance with applicable legislation.

Tapfiliate was created with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliance in mind. 

This regulation includes getting consent, managing data processing agreements, and ensuring data protection mechanisms are in place.

Social Media and Influencer Integration 

Affiliate platforms include tools and features that help companies and influencers collaborate more efficiently, identify and recruit appropriate influencers, track their performance, and manage influencer partnerships.

Tapfiliate makes tracking these influencer activities easier, ensuring that influencers are compensated for their sales and motivating them to promote the brand more.

Social media integration tools enable affiliates to share promotional information directly on their social media channels, thereby increasing the reach and effect of the brand’s affiliate program. 

Affiliates may create trackable links and distribute them directly on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, allowing them to reach their target audience and drive traffic to the brand’s website or landing pages.

Commission Rate Best Practices

Deciding on commission rates for your affiliate program on BigCommerce is an important decision that should be carefully considered. 

Some best practices for reaching this decision with the help of Tapfiliate include: 

Understanding Profit Margins 

Before your brand determines commission rates, you should comprehensively understand your profit margins for each product or service. 

Calculate your costs, including production, shipping, and overhead, to ensure your commission rates are sustainable and meet your profit objectives.

Research Industry Standards

Examine industry standards and compare commission rates in your specialization or business. Observe what competitors and similar brands provide regarding commission rates to understand what is familiar and competitive. 

While you don’t have to match these prices exactly, they provide helpful information about market expectations.

Consider Product Profit

Profit margins vary between products and services. Consider increasing commission rates for products with more significant profit margins or those that are more difficult to sell. 

This act encourages affiliates to promote products that earn more significant returns for them and your business.

Balance Attractiveness and Sustainability 

While significant commission rates may initially entice more affiliates, achieving a balance between appeal and sustainability is critical. 

Excessively high commission rates may harm your budget and profitability over time. Aim for appealing prices to entice affiliates while remaining financially feasible for your firm.

Offer Tiered Commission Structures 

Consider using tiered commission systems depending on performance milestones. You could increase commission rates to affiliates with higher sales volumes or satisfy specified performance criteria. 

Tiered structures offer additional incentives for affiliates to increase sales and reward top performers appropriately.

Create Performance Incentives

In addition to base commission rates, consider providing performance-based incentives to motivate affiliates to go above and beyond. 

This could include incentives for meeting sales targets, converting leads into clients, or producing recurring revenue through subscription-based products or services.

7 Strategies for Running a Successful Affiliate Program in BigCommerce

Running a successful affiliate program takes work. These steps will help to set you up for success so that you are driving revenue.

Set Clear Objectives 

Before establishing your affiliate program on BigCommerce, define clear objectives and targets. 

Try to determine what you aim to achieve through the program, whether it’s increasing sales, expanding brand awareness, or driving traffic to specific product pages. 

Having clear objectives will drive your marketing strategy and allow you to measure the success of your program.

Choose Affiliates Carefully

Choose affiliates who share your brand values, target audience, and marketing objectives. Look for affiliates with relevant material, active audiences, and a robust web presence. 

When picking affiliates, quality is more important than quantity, as collaborating with the appropriate influencers and content creators can result in more meaningful connections and higher conversions.

Offer Competitive Commission Rates

Set competitive commission rates to encourage affiliates to market your products or services—research industry standards and benchmark commission rates within your sector to attract potential affiliates. 

Track Campaign Performance

Using Tapfiliate for your BigCommerce affiliate tracking and analytics will assist in monitoring the performance of your brand’s affiliate program. 

Track critical metrics like clicks, conversions, sales, and affiliate profits to assess the success of your initiatives. Utilize data-driven insights to discover top-performing affiliates, refine marketing campaigns, and allocate resources more effectively.

Prioritize Communication 

Encourage open and transparent communication with your affiliates to foster trust and teamwork. 

It’s essential to inform affiliates of program updates, promotions, and incentives via regular newsletters, email updates, and dedicated communication channels. Provide prompt assistance, feedback, and guidance to any questions or issues they may have.

Reward Affiliate Performance

Offering performance-based incentives and prizes can help affiliates drive more sales and conversions. 

Have your brand consider using tiered compensation systems, bonuses for meeting sales targets, or unique benefits for top-performing affiliates. Recognize and celebrate your affiliates’ achievements to inspire and enhance their devotion to your business.

Monitoring and Optimizing Your BigCommerce Affiliate Program

You may improve your program’s performance and outcomes by closely tracking affiliate sales, evaluating affiliate efficacy, and making intelligent improvements.

Utilize BigCommerce’s and Tapfiliate’s extensive tracking capabilities to track affiliate-driven sales correctly. Track key metrics like clicks, conversions, and revenue for each affiliate to obtain insight into their performance. 

Tracking affiliate sales in real-time with Tapfiliate allows you to evaluate the impact of your affiliate program on overall revenue and discover top-performing affiliates.

Assess the effectiveness of your affiliates using performance metrics and KPIs. Analyze conversion rates, average order value, and customer lifetime value to determine the quality of traffic and referrals generated by each affiliate. 

Remember that determining which affiliates consistently deliver outcomes and contribute to your business objectives will benefit your brand in the future. 

Continuously optimize your affiliate program with performance data and insights. Experiment with commission structures, promotional techniques, and incentives to motivate affiliates and improve outcomes. 

Consider rewarding affiliates for meeting sales targets, creating seasonal promotions, or releasing exclusive deals to promote engagement and motivation.

Maintain open communication with your affiliates and offer regular feedback and support to help them flourish. Advise, marketing resources, and training sessions to help affiliates enhance their promotional efforts and increase sales. 

To ensure an excellent affiliate experience, respond quickly to any issues or concerns.

Key Takeaways

Setting clear objectives, selecting the best affiliates, offering competitive commission rates, and providing ongoing support and communication can’t be understated. 

Additionally, the significance of testing and iterating strategies, fostering long-term relationships with affiliates, and embracing a culture of continual optimization can’t be overstated.

Using affiliate tracking integrations, like Tapfiliate, can help optimize affiliate tracking, commission pricing, and further initiatives for a brand and its partners. 

Future trends in affiliate marketing include:

• The rise of influencer partnerships.
• The integration of AI and machine learning for personalized marketing.
• The expansion of affiliate programs into new markets and platforms.

Finally, brands that value active monitoring, optimization, and adaptation will be well-positioned to survive in BigCommerce’s dynamic affiliate marketing scene. 

By remaining informed, proactive, and adaptable, brands can generate long-term growth, maximize ROI, and build long-term partnerships with their affiliates for mutual success.

👉 Sign up to Tapfiliate today to start tracking your affiliate sales for your BigCommerce store