How to Set Up an Affiliate Program for Shopify

In this guide, we are using OSI Affiliate Software to set up an affiliate program for Shopify.

OSI Affiliate Software makes it easy to create and manage an affiliate program. Watch the video below to see how Omnistar Affiliate Software can grow your business.

See this Shopify course if you want in-depth knowledge on how to market your Shopify store.

Ready to get started? Install OSI Affiliate Software for your Shopify by clicking the link below.

Once installed, you can follow this guide to set up an affiliate program for your Shopify.

If you have any questions not covered in this guide, please visit the Shopify Referral Software Knowledge Base for detailed instructions and resources.

Are you looking to grow your Shopify store using affiliate marketing?

Starting an affiliate program for your Shopify is really easy. Affiliate marketing can help you get more traffic, sales, and customers.

In this article, we’ll show you how to create an affiliate program for Shopify.

The affiliate tracking software we’ll use in this post is OSI Affiliate Software. 

OSI makes it easy to create and manage an affiliate program for Shopify. 

Affiliate marketing is a top online marketing channel for growing your business.

The main reason why affiliate marketing works is because it is cheap and cost effective. You only pay affiliates for the successful sales they send you.

As affiliates promote you in social media, email, blogs, offline, etc. You will only pay them when they send a customer who buys.

As you can see, you can get a lot of traffic from affiliate marketing.

Let’s jump into the post and show you how you will create an affiliate program for your Shopify.

Setting up the App

The first step is to go to the Shopify app store and install Omnistar Affiliate Software.

Follow the video below to see how to add the Omnistar Affiliate Software to your Shopify Store.

Once the setup is done in the the next step it so customize the sign up page and link it up to your store. Follow the video and steps below to complete this process.

Customizing the Signup Page

OSI Affiliate Software provides you complete freedom to customize the affiliate sign-up page. A sample Sign-up Page is shown below.

1. Click on “Set Up Software”, click the link saying “Configure Sign Up Page.“

2. Under the Form Details tab, you can modify the Left side Heading & Text. Below that, you can upload your Logo or paste a logo link and modify the Text on the Right Side Text Area as shown in the sample above. Click “Update“.

Step 3. After updating Page Details, you need to click on Configure Form fields to add new Fields or Update existing Fields/Positions. You can edit and delete existing fields. Click reorder fields and a video will show that you can re-order fields. 

How to Market Your Affiliate Software With Shopify

To market your Shopify Store Affiliate Program try these strategies:

1. You can start with what you have; advertise your affiliate program to your current customers and try to recruit your current customers to join your affiliate program. The benefits of recruiting your current customers are: (a) they are already loyal to you and your product so they believe in it (b) you already have their emails and phone numbers so you can contact them and inform them about your awesome affiliate program (c) who doesn’t want to earn money on the side?
2. Advertise your affiliate program on your website. Make sure to have links on your website where your affiliate program stands out so that your customers and website visitors know you have an affiliate program and they can easily sign up.
3. Make sure your affiliate program is attractive. If you are serious about attracting top affiliates, offer a good commission amount. Do not pay a commission of $1 for $100 products. Most of the top affiliate programs online offer a commission between 30% and 75%.
4. Offer top prizes for your top affiliates. To motivate your affiliates you can offer them prizes for the top affiliates who bring in sales that meet your affiliate program goals.
5. Advertise your affiliate program in online affiliate directories. OSI Affiliate Software has an affiliate directory so you can send us your information to make sure we include you in the directory.
6. Approach bloggers in your industry who target the same audience as your business and give them links and banners and pay them commission for all the successful sales they send your way.
7. If you have the resources you can pay to advertise your affiliate program on tv, radio, online, etc.
8. Don’t just focus online, you can send offline contacts to your affiliate sign up page. A good example of this is when you are in networking events.
9. Partner with other companies in your industry and give them links and pay them for the sales they send you.
10. Do webinars and seminars to advertise your affiliate program and show potential recruits how easy it is to use your affiliate program and earn money on the side.
11. Advertise it on your blog.
12. Have a multi-tier affiliate program. This will help you recruit more affiliates because affiliates will be motivated to recruit other affiliates to join the program because they will earn more.

These are some of the strategies you can use to market your affiliate program. If you have one that we did not include in this list you can send us an email and we can add it. Remember, once you get your program going and recruit affiliates the program will just operate in cruise control.

Adding Creatives for Affiliates

To add promotional materials for your affiliates such as banners and email templates, you may do that by going to the promotional settings section as shown here:

In this section you can provide affiliates with the creatives they can use to promote your store.

There are many types of assets affiliates can use. Here are a few examples

• Coupon codes
• Promo codes
• Email swipe copy
• Banners
• Affiliate coupons

How to Setup Deep Linking with Shopify

Typically the landing page for your affiliate program that your affiliates are referring people to is your Shopify store’s home page, however, we also give you the ability for your affiliates to link to any page of your site which could be a specific product or category page or any page of your web site. This is known as deep linking. To set this up, please follow the video and instructions below:

Step 1. Under the setup page click “Settings -> Show Advanced settings”.

Step 2: Click to Check at  “ Allow Deep-Linking” and Update.

Step 3:  Now Go back to your Dashboard and click the “Users” button and then “Manage Users”.

Step 4:  Go To Manage Users and Click User to Edit.

5: Now Click The link “Login as User”

Step 6:  On the Affiliate Dashboard, click the Create link to a specific page, add the page/product link and click Add Link.

Step 7. Affiliates can copy the link and share it with their friends. 

This is all your affiliates need to do in order to deep-link to any page of your site.

How to Pay Affiliates

If you need to review affiliate sales, leads, and invoices, click on Rewards.

From this page, you can review all the affiliate sales, approve sales, review leads, and manage the invoices.

To pay your affiliates, click on Manage Invoices.

Next, check the invoices for the affiliates you want to pay.

After you have selected the invoices you want to pay, scroll down and from the dropdown, select Create Paypal Mass Payment File.

This will create a file you can upload into PayPal. When you upload this file, it will pay your affiliates.

This post has walked you through how to set up and create an easy affiliate marketing program for Shopify.

This Shopify integration will grow your Shopify business with affiliate and referral marketing.

Please follow the detailed steps in this guide to integrate with Shopify and get your affiliate program going.