Zferral looks great, but the reason companies pay thousands for networks like CJ or tracking like DirectTrack or Linktrust is because these companies invest heavily in infrastructure, stability, and fraud protection to ensure that every valid action gets tracked and paid for, and invalid ones do not. At first glance, Zferral does not inspire the same confidence.
If you just throw up an affiliate script or service without any experience with the industry, you will get destroyed with fraud and traffic quality issues very quickly.
If you take this route for your startup, be sure to hire or at least consult with someone with affiliate experience to design your program correctly. I see new advertisers come up unprepared expecting a flood of customers with zero risk and quickly crash and burn in this industry every day.
I don't want to turn this into a critique of zferral, but as a quick comment, the pricing model is all wrong. If you're a hosted affiliate tracking service, you need to charge per click, like an adserver, and provide the proper SLA. If you're a network, take a percentage of payouts.
Of course, there are several custom options: Tiers, Rev %, Flat commissions. Recurring (forever, for a time), and also a one time sum (plus recurring rev share).
Basically, if you can dream it, you can create it. Use the invite code "hackernews" to gain immediate access upon signup.
"I am sure that 1999 is inspired by your site."- I'm not sure what you're talking about there.
I think I'm confused about what your service does, it looks like the service levels are delimited by number of affiliates and payout amount(to each affiliate? or total to all affiliates?). If you're doing that, it might make sense to be more flexible with pricing and scale costs linearly with clicks/payments.
Anyway, we're veering way off topic here, feel free to shoot me an email if have any questions about attracting people running affiliate programs, I keep in touch with a lot of the major players in the affiliate space.
My last comment (email is forthcoming) but wanted to respond if anyone is curious:
Payment tiers are determined by certain thresholds, including:
- # of affiliates;
- total payout; and
- # of campaigns.
This is because we also support non-monetary campaigns (i.e. Dropbox Referral Program) where a company can create their own "currency" to reward their customers. Obviously, we cannot quantify the value in these instances.
If you just throw up an affiliate script or service without any experience with the industry, you will get destroyed with fraud and traffic quality issues very quickly. If you take this route for your startup, be sure to hire or at least consult with someone with affiliate experience to design your program correctly. I see new advertisers come up unprepared expecting a flood of customers with zero risk and quickly crash and burn in this industry every day.
I don't want to turn this into a critique of zferral, but as a quick comment, the pricing model is all wrong. If you're a hosted affiliate tracking service, you need to charge per click, like an adserver, and provide the proper SLA. If you're a network, take a percentage of payouts.