20+ TOP Ecommerce Affiliate Programs — Best Ecommerce Affiliate Programs of 2024 For Online Money Making

We have some good news and a little bad news. The good news is that, using ecommerce affiliate programs, you can promote a very large range of products, including super expensive ones with high commission rates. The bad news is that you might not be completely ready for the competition in this field.

However, you are in luck, because this article will prepare you for what you should expect when promoting e-Commerce offers. This niche might be challenging, but nothing that you can’t overcome with the right mindset. So keep reading and take notes.

Ecommerce and What it Means For Affiliate Marketers

Simply put, the e-Commerce world includes all the online shops and all the products that get delivered to customers through that online shop. For affiliates, this is good news, since they don't necessarily have to be promoting real-life businesses, but online ones.

The way it works is that you take an e-Commerce shop of your choice, promote a product from that shop, and subsequently earn commissions. However, in this article, we have decided to go deeper in this subject and really investigate all you need to know about working with this vertical.

The reason why affiliate marketers can benefit the most from working with e-Commerce programs is that the survival of an online store or business depends on their affiliates. If nobody promotes a brand, that online brand will likely fall behind the trend. However, if they actually use the help of affiliates, their revenues will boost. Currently, more than 80% of brands have affiliate programs, so why not hop on and make a little bit of the 8 billion dollar revenue for affiliates predicted for 2022?

Why Using an Ecommerce Affiliate Program is Beneficial

We know that promoting e-Commerce offers is good, but why? Why do so many brands like affiliates and why do affiliates like this niche? Here’s why:

• Reach out to more people. This is the first and most important reason. Currently, the majority of people (80%) search online before proceeding to shop for something. This is exactly your time to shine. A simple review blog could grab the attention of a potential customer. Since you could be having multiple channels, promoting multiple offers across multiple categories, this will definitely get you to many more people than you would imagine if you promoted products of only one category. This gets better when the affiliate program or online shop you are trying to promote is famous, such as Amazon. If the brand is already established, then you are already gaining people’s trust.
• No restrictions or limitations. You don’t really have to stop at one affiliate network or program, and that is the beauty of working with e-Commerce. There is always room to grow, and there are always many more offers you could be promoting. Every offer accounts for a new income stream. You could be having multiple blogs/websites, trying different categories of products, and experimenting with different methods for getting traffic. There’s no end.
• Various ways to get paid. This is another benefit that might actually outweigh the rest. Each e-Commerce program can pay you in a different way. That is why you could be promoting different types of offers to encourage your audience to do different things and that not only prevents your marketing brand from becoming stale and repetitive but also provides more ways to earn even more income.

How to Promote e-Commerce Offers

The way that e-Commerce affiliate programs work is the same as many other types of programs. They provide you with an affiliate/promo code you can invite people with. The program then sees your activity and how many people you redirected to their program and based on the way they work, you will be offered compensation.

Of course, you will have to redirect traffic to the affiliate program, but the way you’ll do it depends on their payment model and how they choose to calculate your earnings. Then, you can find ways to get your audience to do that exact thing. Whether it’s to make a purchase or view a product or sign up on a website.

Payment Models

There are different types of ways that an e-Commerce affiliate program might pay you.

• Based on sales. In this type of offer, you will get a commission every time a user that you redirected to the affiliate program makes a purchase. So you could be getting a percentage of the sale, up to even 20%. This is great for people who want to promote certain products, by either reviewing them or giving potential customers offers for discounts. As an example, the Amazon affiliate program works like this.
• Based on customer acquisition. Through this type of offer, you can get paid every time a user clicks on your affiliate link and signs up on an e-Commerce website, interacts with something, or becomes a new customer of that program. This is great for bloggers and influencers who promote businesses as a whole, and not necessarily one certain product.
• Based on impressions. This type of affiliate programs pay you based on the amount of traffic you drive to their website. So, whether the visitors make a purchase or not, you will still get paid based on the unique number of visitors.

However, not in all cases do they pay you based on these 3 specific models. There are some exceptions where they mix some of these models together. For example, an e-Commerce program might pay you both per the number of visitors and the sales generated. So not only you would get paid for driving traffic to the website, but you’ll also get a commission if somebody who visited the website makes a purchase. As mentioned, Amazon is one of the programs that does this.

In other cases, the program might pay you every time somebody signs up on the platform and every time they make a purchase. Your commission rates could increase based on what type of offer you choose.

Choosing the Right Offer

There are many programs and offers out there, so how do you choose the best ones that suit you? Here are some tips:

• Your passion and niche. First and foremost, you need to pay attention to what type of products you have more experience with, have more knowledge about, and have a passion for. If you don’t know anything about gardening tools and you want to promote offers from an online gardening shop, you will not find many people who trust your word or your review. It’s important to have a solid argument when advertising for something so people can trust your opinion.
• Payment model. If you are a blogger or an influencer on Instagram, you should already know that there are certain types of commissions you could be looking for, such as getting paid based on sales and based on views or leads. If their payment model or their commission rate doesn’t match your criteria, you can always find ones that do.
• Brand success. In order to promote products that your audience will buy, you really have to know the brand you are promoting. Never promote a brand that doesn’t have good reviews or reputation, or everybody will know that you are doing it for money. So, firstly, get to know the brand and their success rate and consider the risks of losing an audience.
• Cookie lifetime. Cookies are basically one of the most important parts of affiliate marketing. When a potential customer clicks on your affiliate link, the affiliate program or network will remember it, so the longer the cookie lifetime, the longer that website will remember that you should get paid for the referral. Some programs may offer up to 30 days of cookie lifetime, so definitely look out for that.
• Affiliate tracker. When you redirect someone to an online shop, the shop or ecommerce program should provide a way for affiliates to track their sales, see their commissions, and the traffic they helped drive to the website. If the program you are looking at doesn’t offer such a tracker, then it would be best not to go for it.

Traffic Sources and Finding Leads

When promoting e-Commerce affiliate offers, you need to remember that there are many ways to go about doing it, however, you want to focus on the cheapest or free organic ways, since you can never go wrong with them. That is why in this article, we have collected some of the free and organic ways to promote offers.

SEO

This is the first thing you need to get to. How does SEO benefit you? Most ecommerce affiliates have a blog, YouTube channel, or website that redirects users to the affiliate program website. The way that SEO helps you is through getting you all the potential customers that come from the search results. So you know that if they get to your blog, they already need that product. All you have to do is to attract them. However, that is another topic. What SEO can do for you is make you appear in the search results. This traffic is free and dynamic.

There are some tricks to having a good search engine optimized website, which you learn all about in this article. The gist is that you need to put all your keywords across your texts. Whether it’s the YouTube description or the blog post, the keywords you want to lead in should be reflected throughout the text in the form of long-tail keywords, so they narrow down to actual people’s needs and what they might search instead of general keywords. So let’s say that you want to promote running shoes for an online sportswear shop. The long-tail keywords you could use for getting the attention you need from search results would be “breathable running shoes for women” instead of just “running shoes”. If you want to lead in “running shoes”, your competition would be way too challenging, but narrowing your targeted keywords will get you to the exact customers who are looking for you already.

Website that Converts

So now that you’ve gotten people to visit your partner landing page or blog, you need a way to keep the user browsing your website and actually clicking on a link. This is what we call converting. Having a good landing page really is what makes the difference when it comes to competition. Don’t miss this article we have as a full guide to make an amazing landing page.

You want to do it the standard way that users are already familiar with. That would be having a slogan or an offer, a call to action (such as calling to buy a product in the limited remaining discount time), and some visuals, all at the first glance at your landing in the hero section. The rest just depends on how many of these offers you want to have on the rest of your landing, but keep in mind that most potential customers will only look at your website for half a second and they will immediately decide if they don’t like your website or if they won’t find what they are looking for on it.

To make your campaigns convert, try not to be too pushy to the users, and only make it seem like you are offering them something they cannot reject. For example, instead of saying “Buy these running shoes for 50 dollars right now” say something like “Reach for the sky. 50% discount on checkout for these top-notch running shoes.” You can’t go wrong if you just describe the product in a way that makes people curious.

Social Media

Have you ever been just browsing Instagram seeing multiple people promoting a product they ‘enjoyed’? That is not a coincidence. They are promoting affiliate products, and you can, too. What this requires is creating a loyal audience base that listens to you and is genuinely interested in the product you are promoting. This might have a steep curve to reach the audience you need to actually start promoting products, but once you reach that point, it’s all going to get super easy, to the point that brands will come to you for promotions.

To start with this method, you need to build an influencer personality and talk about certain types of products and passions, to the point that you will gain regular followers. You need to be consistent in your branding and your ideas so people get to trust you. After that, merely reviewing a product can sell it to multiple users.

Some of the best social media for this include Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Especially nowadays TikTok videos get lots of views in a shorter span of time, so you want to give TikTok a chance and redirect people to your landing page for discounts.

Case Studies: How Other Affiliate Marketers Succeeded

Now that we know how to create and promote affiliate offers, let’s take a look at how the above methods have worked for affiliates.

Case #1: Lisa Linh

She started blogging back in 2014 and since then she’s been mostly posting about lifestyle and wellness. However, you will notice something interesting about her when you click on the link in her bio.

You can see that she has a page called “Shop” in which she has products showcased in a way that match her own style. Upon clicking on each product link, you will understand that they are all affiliate links, leading to other online shops, such as small businesses or even Amazon.

As you can see, most of the items are in her own house, which means that she actually bought them, tried them out, and promoted them by using them with her own branding.

You might think 90,000 followers is not a big number, but even this average blog has made her around 1 million dollars in total, just by doing promotions of different products and writing up for them.

Case #2: Chic Pursuit

Chic Pursuit started out small by Maria Julia and nowadays they mostly promote and review beauty and stylish brands. According to them, they have more than 500 000 visits on the website monthly, which makes this blog a good place for affiliate programs of their own type. Upon visiting their landing page, you can see some products, in other words, reviews of products.

When you actually click on an article, you can see multiple products with their affiliate links attached. Not only do they have multiple ads on the pages, but also have multiple affiliate links working from super famous brands that are actually trusted by many, such as Vans, Tommy Hilfiger, and other famous brands.

These e-Commerce affiliate links (and of course the ads) make them about $200 000 a month these days. If there is one lesson you can learn from Chic Pursuit, it would be to keep pursuing your affiliate activity until it blossoms and returns an actual profit.

Considering the fact that both of these affiliates left their previous jobs and studies, you can see that it didn’t take long for them to establish valuable businesses just by promoting products that they actually like.

Conclusion

Now that you know how e-Commerce affiliate programs work and how you can use them to your benefit, you can start from now. There are multiple free ways to kickstart, such as writing on a blog e.g., Medium, making a YouTube channel or a TikTok account. The ways depend on you and what type of products you are more familiar with. Remember, keep your consistency, care about what your audience buys, and be honest about your work.