One of the oldest, most feature-rich and the most stable affiliate marketing solutions available nowadays on the market is Post Affiliate Pro. The first version of Post Affiliate Pro (or shortened PAP) has been developed by a small company at the heart of the Europe, Slovakia, way back in 2004. Back then the company consisted of less than 8 colleagues, who had clear vision – to develop the best product in constantly growing industry, which would satisfy the needs of huge variety of customers. Fast forward time to 2019, when the product celebrates its 15th anniversary and you have the #1 affiliate software reviewed by several hundreds of customers worldwide. The software is currently in its 4th generation, built on advanced and robust engine, open environment and customer centricity in mind.

Of course this achievement would not be possible without constant new product updates, great customer support (which relies on help desk software LiveAgent) and devotion of the company behind to stay at the top place and bring satisfaction to the end users. This way the ever growing base of customers could benefit from fresh batch of features on regular basis.

Benefits for users & product overview

Let’s be honest, Post Affiliate Pro relies on the power, the size and on the capacity of your network. The more affiliates your network contains, the higher business profits you can expect in the future. The first home work for you would be then to build your own one and start inviting your affiliates to it. Scenarios, where both of the parties are satisfied are the best one, aren’t they?

If we should name some its best key features, we would present you the following ones:

• Easy installation, integration and set-up: 1, 2. 3… 59, 60. Just like that, your account is ready in less than minute and you are ready to set-up all the necessary parts of your affiliate marketing software. We were surprised, that the support team offered us automatically free set-up & integration. This is great benefit for customers, who would like to rely on professionals.
• Free trial & flexibility: Everything you need to start your account is email address, name and preferred URL. Post Affiliate Pro comes with 14 day free trial period. At the end of it you have a chance to select your preferred subscription – the “Pro” version starts at 97 $ / month. In case you would like to later switch to higher plans, everything is in your hands.
• Search engine friendly links: Post Affiliate Pro gives you the opportunity to customize the link format exactly the way you want it & like it with several different linking formats. Additional benefit is, that all the links created with Post Affiliate Pro are SEO-friendly.
• Real-time reports: All data are tracked, processed and displayed in real-time with zero delay. These data include impressions, clicks, commissions, sales…). You will always have the reports at your hand as well as the opportunity to see your program’s performance.
• Plugins & integrations: Post Affiliate Pro connects with more than 95 plugins and with robust collection of 200+ web based apps. The collection is just a tip of the iceberg of its capabilities.

The feature list could go on and on, however, this is not the only criteria, which “is responsible” for the success of the implementation of your preferred affiliate marketing software. The second part of the story is connected with the previously mentioned affiliate network. The last piece of the puzzle consists of your already existing website, its popularity among end users as well as the products, you are trying to promote. Did you put tick to every box of the requirements? Fine, you can move on to the actual set-up.

How does it work?

1. To start your account, the first thing you need to do is head to the official websites and create a free trial account.
2. After the successful login you’ll be greeted (as we were) by initial mail, which gives you the opportunity to handle the integration to the company representatives. We selected it and were surprised in a good way how quick the process was. Free integration is very recommended!
3. If you do not select the integration option, you are forced to do it on your own. This could be an issue for some customer, who are not yet used to the system & UI (which is a bit clunky even with the newest theme) or do not have vast knowledge about affiliate marketing, links, banners, commissions… Definitely integrate your eshop, payment processor and website.
4. Approach your partners with request to place your banners & links on their websites. Make sure you create unique banners for your products, so you can easily track the success rate of them.
5. Sit back, relax and wait for the magic to happen!

The UX could use some refresh, which would improve the product usage.
 

Comparison with other affiliate softwares

Sure, Post Affiliate Pro is definitely not the only affiliate software available on the market, there are other solutions such as LeadDyno, HasOffers, iDevAffiliate, TapAffiliate… Some of them might have similar features, performance ratio, pricing or integrations as Post Affiliate Pro, however, what comes as great advantage of PAP is the number of reviews, satisfied customers and also its history (15 years already on the market since the v1). The best overview of what we are currently talking about can be found on GetApp comparison of selected affiliate marketing softwares.

What is good and what is bad?

As every available software on the market, also Post Affiliate Pro has some of its strong advantages and some disadvantages. Let’s find them together below!

Advantages

• Robust, feature-rich system,
• Vast collection of plugins and integrations,
• Free integration & set-up,
• Continuous updates, which deliver new features and plugins throughout the year,
• A+ support,
• Rock-solid tracking,
• Money : performance ratio,
• Affordable additional tracking requests.

Disadvantages

• Outdated app UI (even the most recent theme does not fully copes with the current design trends and UX),
• Outdated design of the website,
• The mobile apps could use design refresh as well,
• No tutorials / onboarding besides the offer to free integration,
• Complexity of the system (could be considered as advantage if you know what to do and where to go).

• Let Post Affiliate Pro increase your business profits through referrals while you sleep: postaffiliatepro.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Final words

The affiliate marketing industry shows constant growth every year (in average about 10% per year), which is a good sign. While the market is pretty saturated with different solutions, we would recommend you to go with Post Affiliate Pro, mainly because of the benefits previously mentioned in our review. Your revenue can grow with the right set of tools and PAP is definitely the one, which should be included in your portfolio. Join the club of over 30.000 affiliate programs and start your affiliate marketing initiative.

It’s sometimes said that getting ahead in business (as opposed to, say, academia) comes down to who you know, not what you know. Things are different still in ecommerce. When you’re selling online at scale, success is more closely linked to the tools you use. Everyone has access to the same research and networking resources, and the software you rely on determines everything from the amount of free time you have to the quality of your work.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Let’s suppose that you have ambitions to achieve great things in ecommerce. Perhaps you’re already running and trying to grow a store, or maybe you’re contemplating running one and trying to get prepared. No matter your situation, there’s great value in having a solid lineup of SaaS tools to help you along the way. Here are 8 must-have tools for ecommerce that are praised by most ecommerce agencies.

Salesforce

The real long-term value in ecommerce comes from loyal customers. They visit unprompted, spend more, and contribute additional traffic through recommendations — and to win (and keep) loyal customers, you need to stay connected with them. CRM (customer relationship management) software is key to this, and Salesforce is the industry leader.

With Salesforce configured, you’ll be able to monitor everything that’s going on with your customers from a single dashboard: how much money each customer is spending, how long they’re spending on your site, what support issues they’re facing, etc. This data will help you improve your store. It is a paid solution, but $25 per month for the essentials isn’t bad.

Prisync

Knowing how to price your products is a persistent challenge in online retail. Go too low, and you’ll destroy your profit margin — and potentially induce a comparable reduction from your competitors, making things tougher for everyone. But go too high and you’ll price yourself out of contention. How do you get the balance right?

Prisync is a price tracking service that helps you maintain an advantage over other stores. It checks industry prices several times each day, so you can always keep up, and it integrates readily with all standard ecommerce platforms. It’s not cheap, starting at $59 per month for 100 products, but it may be worth it — particularly if your products are relatively expensive.

Easil

The importance of promotion through social media and blog posts is not to be underestimated. Getting a glossy ad in the right place at the right time can make all the difference — but if it’s going to get attention in the fast-paced stream of social updates, it needs to look the part, with strong visuals and sharp design.

While Canva may get the lion’s share of attention when it comes to design tools, Easil has some major advantages. For instance, it supports text shadowing by default, allows you to set per-pixel positions, and has a native service for consulting a professional designer should you decide that you need some assistance. Use it for free, or pay $7.50 per month to get a greatly-expanded range of templates plus a variety of new options.

Tawk.to

Strong support is more of a priority today than ever before. The number of people viewing your store can fluctuate wildly, and there may come a time (during a sale, for instance) at which you’re getting far more interest than you can handle over the phone or through an email ticketing system. Fail to answer an important question when it’s posed and the person asking will likely just decide to seek assistance elsewhere.

Tawk.to is a free service for adding a live chat service to your online store. When someone has a question, they can simply type it in and wait for a reply. And because one person can handle numerous simple support conversations roughly simultaneously, using live chat both increases convenience for customers and saves you time.

Zoho Books

Keeping your accounts tidy is a core demand of running a business of any kind, and since ecommerce leaves a minimal physical trace, it’s even more important that you log everything carefully and maintain in-depth records. The more easily you can tell where all your money is going, the better equipped you’ll be to reap efficiency gains.

Zoho Books, part of the broader Zoho suite of SaaS tools, comes well-recommended as an accounting tool for its ease of use and reasonable pricing (starting at $9 per month). It doesn’t do payroll, but that’s becoming a rare native feature anyway, so don’t let that dissuade you. Give the trial a try and see what you think.

Freshmarketer

The ease of A/B testing is one of the greatest advantages of digital content. If you’re not sure whether a particular change is worth making, you can simply run a split test to directly compare the two variants before keeping whichever one comes out on top. It’s particularly handy when you’re lacking context — for instance, if you buy a ready-built store and don’t know why the design choices were made, you can use A/B testing to gauge the reasoning behind them.

Now, you’ll hear (and read) a lot about Optimizely for A/B testing. It’s the most popular option by far, and typically the most highly-rated. However, it uses a pricing model shrouded in mystery, which may be because it tends to be very expensive. For that reason, I suggest trying Freshmarketer. It’ll easily integrate with popular platforms, creating heatmaps and split testing (complete with a WYSIWYG page editor), and it costs just $99 per month for 50,000 monthly visitors with all features available.

Segmentify

Online customer experiences need to be personalized wherever possible if you want to exceed expectations. After all, everyone has different product and offer preferences, and a shopper will be more likely to buy if they find a page catered to their needs instead of something generic.

Segmentify is all about nailing personalization for product recommendations, marketing emails, and push notifications. It collects visitor data, adjusts content accordingly, then repeats the process — this ensures ongoing optimization that should keep value going up. It is somewhat frustrating that the pricing model is quite opaque (you need to request a quote if you want a meaningful figure), but used at scale, it could be a game-changer.

Super Monitoring

In general business, they say time is money — but in ecommerce, uptime is money. You can’t sell when your website isn’t live, and every moment of inaccessibility contributes to a negative perception of your business. Who wants to frequent a store that clearly isn’t reliable? So you need to know when your store is down — otherwise, you can’t do much about it.

The value of Super Monitoring, then, is quite clear. It not only loads your website at regular intervals to confirm that it’s responsive, but it can also run through set routines (e.g. filling in specific forms, such as at the checkout stage) to confirm that everything is working as it should. And with every fault corroborated from multiple locations, you don’t need to worry about false alarms. The tier best suited for ecommerce is $29.99 per month, but there are plenty of options, so see which one is right for you.

Work these 8 SaaS tools into your ecommerce strategy and you’ll see a range of benefits. Your monthly expenses will go up, of course, but the value you’ll receive over the coming months will more than justify that investment.

About the Author

Ecommerce Tips is an industry-leading ecommerce blog dedicated to sharing business and entrepreneurial insights from the sector. Start growing your business today and check out the latest on Twitter @myecommercetips