Affiliate Marketing Program Checklist

Document the program's revenue target, target CAC ceiling, and target MER contribution. Anchor commission economics to gross margin minus contribution-margin floor — paying 20% on a SKU with a 25% margin is how affiliate programs lose money quietly. The marketing lead owns this artifact.

Compare Refersion (Shopify-native, mid-market), Impact (enterprise, partnership-focused), ShareASale and Awin (network reach), and GRIN or Aspire (creator-first). In-house custom builds give full control but require engineering for tracking, payouts, and tax. Pick based on tech stack fit and whether you want network-supplied affiliates vs. private recruitment.

Stand up server-side tracking with a postback endpoint, a click-to-conversion attribution table, and last-click logic by default. Engineering should also build the payout export so finance can run monthly affiliate ACH or PayPal disbursements without manual SQL.

Cover commission rate, cookie window, payment terms (net-30 or net-60 typical), prohibited promotion methods (trademark bidding, cookie stuffing, incentivized clicks), FTC disclosure obligations, and termination clauses. Have legal review before publishing — this is the contract that lets you claw back commissions on fraudulent traffic.

Install the platform's pixel on the order-confirmation page and verify it fires on test orders for both desktop and mobile. For Shopify, confirm the postback fires after the Thank You page and that order_id, gross sales, and currency are passed correctly. Cross-domain attribution is the most common day-one bug.

Most DTC programs land at 8–15% of net sale with a 30-day cookie. Coupon and loyalty sites (Honey, RetailMeNot) typically get a reduced rate or are excluded entirely to protect last-click economics. Tiered structures reward top affiliates after a monthly revenue threshold; recurring structures pay on subscription renewals.

Source niche bloggers, YouTube reviewers, Instagram and TikTok creators, comparison sites, and content publishers ranking for your category keywords. Tools like Ahrefs (referring domains of competitors), GRIN's discovery, and SparkToro surface real prospects faster than cold scraping. Aim for fit over volume.

Lead with EPC and conversion rate from existing affiliates, not with vague brand pitch. Specify commission rate, cookie window, payout method, and what creative they get on day one. Personalize the first sentence to their content — generic blasts get marked as spam and damage your sending domain.

Post in category-relevant subreddits, Discord servers, Slack communities, and Facebook Groups where affiliates already gather. Affiliate Summit, Awin's network, and ShareASale's marketplace also surface inbound applicants. Always disclose you're the brand, not a third party — moderators ban undisclosed promotion.

Check the applicant's site, social handles, and content history for brand alignment, FTC disclosure habits, and red flags (coupon-only sites if you exclude them, sites you'd be embarrassed to be associated with). For creators, verify follower authenticity with HypeAuditor or similar — purchased followings are common.

Send the welcome email with their unique tracking link, coupon code, login to the affiliate portal, link to creative assets, and the signed program agreement. Tax forms (W-9 or W-8BEN) get collected here so the first payout isn't blocked.

Produce 300x250, 728x90, 160x600, 320x50, and 300x600 in static and animated versions. Affiliates who don't have to make their own creative promote 3–5x more often. Include the affiliate's tracking link macro in the asset pack so they can drop in their ID.

Provide approved short-form (50 words), long-form (300 words), and bullet-list versions per top SKU, plus the substantiation for any product claims. Affiliates copying unsubstantiated claims into their content is how brands end up named in FTC enforcement actions alongside the influencer.

Provide three to five email templates affiliates can swipe — product launch, restock, seasonal sale, abandoned-list re-engagement. Pre-fill required FTC disclosure language and the affiliate-link placeholder. Templates that omit disclosure put the affiliate at risk and create deniability problems for you.

Generate per-affiliate unique coupon codes (typically 10–15% off) so attribution survives even when the affiliate's link is stripped. Pair each coupon with the affiliate's deep links to top SKUs. Document this in the affiliate portal so it's self-serve.

Walk through the portal, top-converting placements, FTC disclosure expectations, and what's prohibited (trademark bidding on Google Ads, cookie stuffing, fake review sites). Record it so the next cohort gets the same baseline without you running it live every month.

Pull EPC, conversion rate, AOV, and refund-adjusted commission per affiliate. Sort the bottom decile by EPC under $0.10 — those are dead links wasting your creative. Sort the top decile and prioritize them for the next quarterly review.

Alert on impossible click-to-conversion ratios, traffic from a single IP, mismatched referrer / IP geography, sudden coupon-stacking spikes, and brand-keyword search traffic appearing in affiliate referrals. Refersion and Impact ship this; in-house attribution needs custom rules.

Run brand-name searches across Google, Bing, and YouTube from a clean browser and check whether affiliates are bidding on your trademark or close variants. BrandVerity and The Search Monitor automate this. Trademark bidding by affiliates inflates your CAC by competing with your own brand campaigns.

Meet 1:1 with the top 10 affiliates by net commission. Share their EPC vs. program average, surface upcoming launches, and negotiate exclusive placements or rate bumps for the highest performers. This is where retention happens — top affiliates have offers from your competitors.

Shift bonus budget, exclusive promo codes, and launch placements toward affiliates with strong contribution-margin ROAS, not just gross ROAS. A coupon site with 8x gross ROAS but heavy code-stacking on already-discounted SKUs is often margin-negative once stacked.

Spot-check the top 25 affiliates' recent posts for clear, conspicuous disclosure per the FTC Endorsement Guides — #ad, #sponsored, or 'paid partnership' near the top, not buried at the end. Hashtag-only disclosures inside a wall of tags fail the 'clear and conspicuous' test.

Email the affiliate with the specific post URL, the missing disclosure, and a 7-day cure deadline. Document the notice and response in the affiliate's record. Repeat violations are grounds for program termination per the agreement and protect the brand if the FTC ever inquires.

US-based affiliates expecting $600+ in commissions need a W-9 on file before payout; non-US affiliates need W-8BEN. Block payouts in the platform until the form is collected — chasing tax forms in January for the prior year's 1099 is the worst version of this workflow.

Target a 24-hour first response on missing-commission, broken-link, and payout-question tickets. Affiliate churn correlates more with support responsiveness than with rate — top affiliates leave when their February payout is silently late.

Reverse commissions on refunded orders, chargebacks, and detected fraudulent traffic per the agreement's clawback clause. Communicate reversals before they hit the affiliate's next statement so they aren't blindsided. Most platforms automate refund-driven reversals; fraud reversals are manual.

Review the agreement against current FTC guidance, new state privacy laws, and any prohibited-promotion patterns surfaced in the last quarter. Notify all active affiliates of material changes 30 days before they take effect — silent term changes are an enforcement risk.