When you do business online you usually have to make a choice: either you want to receive money from customers directly to your, let's say, PayPal or Authorize.net merchant account and then pay your affiliates yourself (PRIVATE Affiliate Management System approach) OR you may want some reliable company to collect money from your customers and pay all commissions to your affiliates instead of you (COMPLETE Affiliate Management System approach).

Both ways are very different and, obviously, have their own advantages and disadvantages. Here at Click2Sell we always wanted to make the system as flexible as possible and this way get the best from the 'both worlds'. That is how Click2Sell HYBRID  Affiliate Management System was born. The main purpose of Click2Sell HYBRID Affiliate Management is to join the most important benefits of these two very different business approaches and eliminate negatives of them as well. Such synthesis produces a very new, unique and innovative way to manage your business and affiliates.

Hybrid Affiliate Management System gives you the best things from both worlds: use your own merchant account for getting money from your customers immediately after a sale and completely automate and outsource commissions payments to your hundreds or thousands of affiliates. You won't have to compromise yourself.

The essence of the HYBRID Affiliate Management System: you process payments directly to your merchant or Paypal account and get paid instantly after sale. You can completely control all your affiliates, recruit new ones and run your affiliate programs, but at the same time Click2Sell takes care of paying all your affiliates automatically. Just make sure that your Click2Sell Balance has enough of funds to cover commissions for affiliate sales.

Key benefits you will get by using Hybrid Affiliate Management System:

• Accept payments from your customers directly to your merchant account. No more waiting for checks or long delayed money transfers. Click2Sell works with many payment gateways smoothly: PayPal, Moneybookers, Google Checkout, Worldpay, Authorize.net, eWay, LinkPoint, First Data, Your Pay, PayPoint, Moneris, Sage Pay (former Protx), Optimal Payments, Ogone.

• Retain control of various aspects of your business: 100% control of your business policies, money back guarantees and refunds. We do not interfere in such areas.

• You can sell any legal product you want - we do not control this.

• Pay Affiliates easily - the new Click2Sell Balance feature will help you easily pay your affiliates who use many different payment accounts or currencies. You simply go to your Balance page and enter your Paypal or credit card details and then Click2Sell system will automatically charge your accounts for affiliate sales. Several options are available to completely automate refilling of your Balance, so you won’t need to spend any time for this at all! Then every week we will take care of paying your affiliates via dozens of their preferred payment options: PayPal, Moneybookers, wire-transfers in five different currencies, so you won't have to. Just make sure that your Balance has enough funds to cover affiliate sales and we will make all the work.

• Clearance period - all your affiliates will be paid every week by Click2Sell with a 14 days clearance period. For example, if your affiliate makes a sale today, the transaction will be in a 'clerance' for the comming 14 days and then on the nearest Monday affiliate commission will be sent to the affiliate automatically.

• Use integrated Click2Sell Affiliate Network to boost your sales - your products will be listed in public Click2Sell Marketplace which is frequently visited by Click2Sell affiliates. They have great confidence in merchants using “Hybrid” model, so you can realistically expect to have many affiliates promoting your products. In other words, Click2Sell will stake its reputation on affiliate commissions to be paid since we are paying affiliates for you.

• Your products will also be available to many 3rd party software / services as Click2Sell marketplace is fully available in XML data. Widgets for websites/blogs, text ads, auto-website generators, major databases of products for affiliates – all of them use XML data of Click2Sell marketplace. Thus your products will be available to them as well! 

Requirements. Merchants using Hybrid Affiliate Management System will have to fulfil one of the following requirements below in order to have their products listed in Click2Sell marketplace:

1. PayPal API data saved in Click2Sell account or
2. Pre-pay $50 to your Click2Sell Balance for your future commission payments or
3. Enter credit card details, so that Click2Sell system would be able to charge your card right after affiliate makes a sale and reserve a commission.

Click2Sell fee will depend on the price of product you sell:

• If product's price is up to 19.99 USD, then 1 USD fee/sale will be applied.
• If product's price is 20 USD – 39.99 USD, then 2 USD fee/sale will be applied.
• If product's price is 40 USD or more, then 3 USD fee/sale will be applied.
• No set-up fee.
• No hidden fees.

All the questions you have regarding Click2Sell HYBRID Affiliate Management System will be answered by C2S Support! Just ask! You may also find interesting to read about Best Affiliate Management Systems in one account on Click2Sell website.

Do you want to sell products online and accept credit cards and Paypal payments from your customers? Click2Sell COMPLETE Affiliate Management System is the solution you need.

COMPLETE Affiliate Management System for merchants is an all-in-one e-commerce payment processing and affiliate marketing system that enables you to accept credit card and Paypal payments from your customers online. All you need is a digital product to sell and Click2Sell Affiliate Marketing Network will take care of all your e-commerce needs.

If you seek for hassle-free, info-products friendly credit card processing and completely outsourced affiliates' management, look no more. COMPLETE Affiliate Management System at Click2Sell will let you focus on development of your new products or services.

Key features of COMPLETE Affiliate Management:

• Easy way to accept credit cards online – no merchant account needed; Just add your product to Click2Sell system, get activated! Click2Sell will buy and resell your product to the end customer (immediate resell business model). Customer will be able to pay by credit card or PayPal.

• Click2Sell takes complete care of your affiliates. You won't need to worry about paying your affiliates on time. Click2Sell will pay all your affiliates every Monday with a 14 days delay - transaction clearance period. For example, if your affiliate makes a sale today, the system will wait 14 days for transaction to 'clear' and then pay out your affiliate on next Monday. This is done to save your money in case of refunds.

• Save your time – let us handle all refund requests and chargebacks; We handle all your customers' refund requests and help them. A lot of times refunds happen just because a customer has some issues opening your product's file or just don't know what to do. We provide assistance in all the cases, so your product's refund rates are reduced even more! We deal with your chargebacks, so you don't have to. We don't ask you to provide any additional information about the fulfilled order or any filled documents to fight back the case. We handle everything ourselves and our experience in dealing properly with chargebacks allow us to win a lot of them for you… You don't have to do anything yourself – we deal it for you.

• Intelligent Click2Sell Anti-Fraud system saves you from fraudulent sales and excessive chargebacks. You will be protected against fraud! Within many years doing business online we have encountered almost every possible fraudulent scheme and dealt with fraudulent sales initiated by customers or affiliates. We have developed our own artificial intelligence based Click2Sell anti-fraud system that will provide additional security for your sales at no additional cost. We detect fraudulent sales, affiliate scammers and possible chargebacks and stop them before they happen. You can relax and care only about your own business. Leave the hard job for us.

• 10% reserve protects you from losing money in case of refunds or chargebacks. 10% of your and affiliates' sales amount goes directly to the Click2Sell rolling reserve for 6 months and are used to compensate possible refunds and chargebacks that happen months after the commissions payment. This way you can be sure that you do not lose money in case of refunds or chargebacks later. The money is released from the Reserve right after 6 months on the nearest pay day to your bank account.

• Get your earnings directly to your bank account without having to wait months for checks. All merchants will be paid every week (on Monday) with a 14 day delay period. This means that if you make sale today, it will enter a "clearance" period (to protect you from refunds / chargebacks which usually come within first couple of weeks) for 14 days. After this period sale will be cleared and you will be paid on the coming Monday. So if you make sales regularly you will start receiving payments every Monday – from the 3rd week of a start. All your earnings will be paid directly to your bank account via wire-transfer, Paypal or Moneybookers accounts. We work closely with our merchants and affiliates and we arrange all the payments in the most convenient way for you.

• We do your Customer Support for you! We deal with your customers when they ask for the help to open the product's file, when they fill out a claim or complaint and ask for a refund, we direct them to download a special software in case they need it to open your product. We even forward messages asking for support that can only be handled by you. We minimize your customer support care, so you can concentrate only on the most important business aspects.  

Requirements to get COMPLETE Affiliate Management System activated:

• Personal or business information:
  • In case you'll be selling as Individual: copy of valid personal ID, proof of address;
  • In case you'll be selling as Company: copy of Business registration certificate, VAT number (if available)), proof of business address;
• Your product / service explanation and description - this you'll be able to provide during the product's addition process.

COMPLETE Affiliate Management System fees:

• Payments processing rate is:
  • In case of direct sale (when sale is made without affiliate's help) the fee is 1 USD + 7% (paid by merchant);
  • In case of affiliated sale (when affiliate refers customer to merchant) the fee 1 USD + 7% is split 50/50 between merchant and affiliate.
• Refund fee – 1 USD
• Chargeback fee – 30 USD
• Setup fee – NO setup fees!
• NO monthly, annual, review, product listing or other fees – Pay only when you make a sale!

Click2Sell COMPLETE Affiliate Management System will be launched on 1st of November 2010 and then you'll be able to switch from current version to COMPLETE System.You will have to login to your account and check the welcome message. It will show you step by step instructions how to order / activate the COMPLETE Affiliate Management System. Contact Click2Sell Support for more information. You may find interesting to read more about opening Merchant Account to accept Credit Cards from customers on our website.

Today we'd like to introduce 1 of 3 new Click2Sell Affiliate Management Systems which will be available for all Click2Sell merchants from 1st of November 2010. It's called PRIVATE (for a reason).

Let's say you have a private business and you want to run it by your own rules having complete control of all your payments and affiliates. In this case you want to manage everything on your own:

• accept payments directly to your payment processor accounts
• manage the list of your affiliates
• control your affiliate program completely
• pay out affiliates yourself – as often as you want and whenever you want.

Click2Sell is at your service here – our PRIVATE Affiliate Management System is exactly what you need.

The essence of the PRIVATE Affiliate Management System: you get payments from customers directly to your merchant account and completely control your affiliate program – you pay affiliates yourself.

In order to start selling products you only need a PayPal or Moneybookers account and you are good to go! Say you want to accept credit card payments? No problem! Just get a merchant account from one of our supported credit card processors, add it to your Click2Sell account and you can easily accept credit card payments.

Key features of PRIVATE Affiliate Management:

• complete control of your affiliates and payments. Only you decide how often you want to pay your affiliates and when to pay them by configuring just two simple but yet powerful new features:

• clearance period– period of time (in days) to wait for an affiliate sale to become valid (cleared). Once an affiliate makes a sale that sale enters the 'clearance period' – the time period when affiliate commissions are not generated for affiliate to be paid. This helps you protect yourself from possible affiliate sales refunds or chargebacks and protect yourself from situations when you pay out affiliate commissions and later the refund or chargeback comes.

• payments frequency– determines how often you'll pay commissions to your affiliates. Click2Sell system will generate settlements for cleared affiliate sales in your specified frequency. For i.e. if you select to pay out your affiliates 'bi-weekly' Click2Sell system will generate affiliate commission invoices for you to pay every 2 weeks for those sales that are 'cleared' – after the clearance period.

You will be able to mark settlements as paid manually.  So you can choose alternative affiliate payments methods (for example cash or payments via other payment systems). This also allows you to run an independent accounting suitable to your own needs.

• ability to run private affiliate programs. You will have the ability to create your own affiliate programs on your website and attract affiliates to join them (note: your product will not be shown on Click2Sell marketplace).

• regularly monitored affiliates. We monitor all Click2Sell affiliates for spamming, scamming or any other fraudulent activities, so you don’t have to worry about legitimacy of your affiliates. We’ll take care of it!

• intelligent anti-fraud protection for your transactions. Many individual merchants face a huge problem with their affiliates' fraudulent sales. Here on Click2Sell we constantly monitor each and every affiliate for fraud. Our own developed anti-fraud system automatically detects all fraudulent activities and terminates such 'affiliates' . You don't have to do any screening on your own. You can be sure that your business will always be safe on Click2Sell.

• convenient tools to keep in touch with your affiliates. Click2Sell Mailer allows you to contact all your affiliates directly from Click2Sell system and announce all your promotional campaigns and new product launches. You can send them regular newsletters or just contact desired individual affiliate.

• absolute freedom in running your business. Click2Sell does not put any restrictions on you. You determine the policies, you provide guarantees, you handle refunds / chargebacks. All affiliates are yours and you have a full control what to do with them – contact, encourage or just keep for the future.

Click2Sell fee will depend on the price of product you sell:

• If product's price is up to 19.99 USD, then 1 USD fee/sale will be applied.
• If product's price is 20 USD – 39.99 USD, then 2 USD fee/sale will be applied.
• If product's price is 40 USD or more, then 3 USD fee/sale will be applied.
• No set-up fee.
• No hidden fees.

Remember – when you use PRIVATE Affiliate Management System we don’t ask any questions about your business – it’s yours and you run it like you want to! Click2Sell PRIVATE Affiliate Management System will be available to you from 1st of November 2010. Contact Click2Sell support for more information. You may find useful to read more about Best Affiliate Management Systems in one merchant account on our website.

Today we want to share with you one statistic which can answer perhaps number one question for product sellers joining Click2Sell. Their question is like "How many sales can I expect from affiliates".

Such question is very difficult to be answered, because every product and its website are unique, they have different niches, different level of provided promotional materials, etc., etc., etc. So instead of trying to guess how many sales affiliates can bring to you, we will just reveal that more than 60% of total sales in Click2Sell system are referred by affiliates (in September 2009 – April 2010).

Of course, it does not mean that sales of new Click2Sell merchant will improve by exactly 60%. There are a lot of merchants who have vastly different ratio of affiliate sales. It mainly happens due to two reasons:

• there are sellers who simply make their products unavailable for affiliates and sell their products themselves. Their products are not listed in Click2Sell marketplace, they do not seek for affiliates, thus naturally their ratio of affiliate sales is just 0. Oh thank you for reducing total affiliate sales ratio in Click2Sell to "just" 60%
   
• there are products which are almost 100% affiliate driven which means that the products’ sellers do not do anything in order to promote their products and all of their sales come from affiliates’ campaigns.

But as I have already mentioned before, if we just divide total number of affiliates sales by the total number of all all sales in Click2Sell, then we get 60%. I guess that you are more likely to be the one who would want to belong to the second group I mentioned above. If yes, then please listen carefully.

There is one thing that you have to avoid, if you want to have many affiliate sales: do not just place your product in Click2Sell and leave it. Click2Sell affiliates can find out a lot about products listed in Click2Sell (we do not want them to pick products for promotions blindly), so if some product has just zeros in its statistics (0.00% conversion ratio, 0 popularity), then naturally affiliates will be reluctant to pick such product for promotions. Make sure that your own sales come through Click2Sell or actively search for affiliates yourself (announce about your product’s affiliate program in related forums, blogs, etc.; look for affiliate brokers). Put a bit of efforts to make the first step towards affiliates. Do not just put your product and forget it. After all, if you do not care about your products, then potential affiliates will not be either.

In recent years we wrote some articles about how to gather and maintain your group of affiliates. Sellers who have 80% ratio of affiliate sales use techniques and tips outlines in these articles. So we suggest you to check them out:
Top Merchants Have Many Affiliates. WHY? Learn Their Techniques To Increase Your Legion of Affiliates
10 Ways to Make Affiliates Loyal and Active
7 Tips How to Manage Affiliates Successfully

So basically speaking, just make sure that your product has appealing affiliate commission percentage (minimum 50%), as much promotional materials as possible, some sales to make sure your statistics are not full of zeros, respect your affiliates and then you will have way more than our average 60% ratio of affiliate sales.

Probably one of the most overlooked features in Click2Sell is an ability to modify purchase confirmation messages that customers get from Click2Sell.EU system after purchasing your (merchant) products.

Standard purchase confirmation message contains information about purchased product, its description, a link to the secret thank-you page, billing address and seller’s contact email. You can add or remove anything you want. As most of email reading software show HTML messages without any problem, you can create very stylish messages using HTML code if you need.

Here’s just a few benefits you can gain by customizing Click2Sell purchase notification letters:

• Text of our standard purchase notification message has to suit needs of various sellers (digital products creators, material goods sellers, etc.), so it might not be clearly understandable for your customers. Minor tweaks of the text can be helpful for your customers.
   
• Many people prefer to have some essential information about their purchases saved in their mail for future reference. Do them a favour.
   
• It happens (and quite often) that buyers’ computers crash or browsers are accidentally closed just before accessing your product’s thank-you page, so buyers lose much of their purchased content. Just putting some additional information about your product in purchase confirmation messages will save your customers from such headaches and you will have to spend less time on helping such people to retrieve their paid content again.
   
• Highly customized purchase notification messages will increase your product’s and your company’s brands. Comprehensive and distinctive purchase confirmation messages will make your products look well-polished and even lower your product’s refund or chargeback rate (as sometimes just a link to your thank-you page might be just not enough for your customers to understand how they can receive their purchases).

So, if you decide to customize purchase notifications, please, login to your account and go this way:

"For Merchant" -> click on product’s name -> "Customize product pages" -> "Checkout".

At the very bottom of the page you will see a field with standart text of the purchase confirmation message. A very minimum knowledge of HTML language will be enough to understand how you can alter text there.

It is not obligatory to modify standart purchase confirmation messages. But even small efforts to tweak and modify those notifications’ letters may greatly increase your customers’ satisfaction and increase your profits!

Of course, once you make changes to Click2Sell purchase confirmation messages, do not forget to make a test purchase (by using "Test Buy" feature) in order to see if your modifications are reflected correctly! Happy selling!

A very frequent question that we get is something like "I added some products in my Click2Sell account, but I’m not sure if I did everything correctly". Let me answer this question to dissipate your doubt if you are wondering about the same thing.

Luckily, there is not much what you have to do in order to have "everything setup correctly". There are just a few very simple things that you have to keep in mind once you are adding a product for selling at Click2Sell:

1. Once you finish adding your product for selling on Click2Sell, you will get unique buy button/link codes for that product. They have to be placed in your product’s website. If you won’t add Click2Sell provided "Buy Now" buttons, Click2Sell service will be useless, because we won’t be able to track sales for you and your affiliates. This is the only thing that you have to add into your website. You won’t need to alter your secret thank-you pages or anything else, there is no pixel tracking to be added somewhere.

2. Once you add "Buy Now" buttons or links, make sure that in the same website there are no other ways for your customers to purchase your products. Click2Sell buy buttons have to be the only option for your customers. It may sound sternly, but there is a very simple reason for such requirement: we can not track sales taking place in some other system than ours, thus if your affiliate refers you a customer and the customer orders your product via some other payment system than ours, naturally we won’t register any sale for the affiliate and he/she won’t earn any commission. I bet you don’t want your business partners to lose their money.

Well, that’s all. These are the only requirements for your products and websites. You may also check some advices on optional things and find an answer to some frequently asked questions as: 

Why doesn’t my product appear in Click2Sell marketplace? It will be listed in the marketplace once it is sold at least once via Click2Sell system (test purchases are not counted as sales). Please note that product’s listing in Click2Sell marketplace is just one of many things in our system. If your product is not listed on Click2Sell marketplace, it doesn’t mean that you cannot sell it – you still can sell your products, gather your own affiliates, analyze gathered statistics and so on.

Make sure you add as much promotional materials as possible. Recruit Affiliates with banners, pre-written letters or articles, forum signatures, PPC keywords lists, custom websites. This will greatly increase interest of your potential affiliates to your product. Of course, the product and its website has to be of quite good quality.

Make a test purchase of your product. You won’t believe how many sales are lost just due to incorrectly written sellers’ PayPal email addresses. Just try a test purchase once (it never hurts) to be sure that transaction process is correct. If you can’t make a test purchase yourself, contact us via "Support" section and we will gladly help you.

Do I have to place a pixel in my thank-you page for affiliate tracking? No, you don’t have to. We use a different kind of tracking, so no need to mess with your secret pages.

Can I change images of Click2Sell Buy Now buttons? Of course! It is fairly simple and safe procedure. You may read Buy Now buttons modification article in order to know how to do that.

Four months have passed since the launch of our new network of servers which host Click2Sell Affiliate Network system and serve your needs there. That was the first major upgrade of our used servers which were set up before Click2Sell launch three years ago. The old servers performed really well and managed to serve thousands of users without any major issue. During the first three years uptime of the old servers were ~99.87%, and what’s even more impressive is that most of the downtime were just planned system updates (sometimes we naturally had to temporarily close the system in order to update Click2Sell code).

However, growing numbers of users and sales-per-day clearly indicated that it might be difficult for the old servers to handle amount of sales and users in the end of this year. We didn’t wait for the old servers to start mildly choking, because we wanted to provide a top notch reliability for our users. At Click2Sell there’s no place for worries like “do my placed Click2Sell buy buttons work? Can my customers order my products without any noticeable delay?”. We take our responsibility very seriously to make sure that your customers could order your products at any time. Thus even the old servers worked sufficiently, we decided to make another step forward.

Let me tell you how our new network of shiny servers will help you to sell products online or promote them:

• Better uptime ratio (yes, you may be giggling that improving the ratio from the previous ~99.87% to idealistic 100% will save just 2 minutes every day, but who knows what might happen during these two extra minutes? Maybe an additional sale for you?).
• Improved data back-up service. Now servers monitor each other and distribute their information much more efficiently, thus your sales data is extremely safe. Even if one or another server irreparable crashes, your data won’t be lost or affected at all. Rest assured, your data is safe.
• Better distribution of load among servers in the network. Theoretically it was possible that, considering such sales growing tendency as ours, some of your customers might experience a bit slower order processes than others in the end of this year. That’s because sometimes the bigger part of customers might be visiting just one of our servers, leaving other servers empty-handed. But don’t worry, such theoretical scenario won’t be possible any more as we took preemptive actions by re-configuring our new servers.
• Can serve a lot more sellers and affiliates. How many times have you seen such thing that once some website becomes very popular, it also becomes awfully slow as its server(s) can’t handle increased traffic and usage? Well, it won’t happen here at Click2Sell (unless every man and his dog start selling products via our system).

Although it may seem that such things won’t increase your sales significantly, but it will give you a feel of bigger security and reliability. It will also be somewhat more comfortable to browse in your Click2Sell Affiliate Network members area. I just want to notice again that we have improved our network of servers not in order to fix some imaginary worsened Click2Sell condition. No, building state-of-the-art network of servers which is always more than sufficient to serve its users is part of our striving for excellence.

I suppose that you have faced such situation before: you prepared some exciting improvements of your products and wanted to let your customers and affiliates know about them, but gathering email addresses of your customers took some precious hours, while contacting your affiliates was practically impossible because all you knew about them was just their names.

In Click2Sell you won’t face such issues. By just a few clicks you can message all your customers and affiliates at once. No manual collecting of emails is necessary, Click2Sell will do it for you. All that you need to do is just to prepare a text which you want to send to your customers or affiliates.

The mailer is especially useful, if you continuously update your products or services and want others to know about the changes. It is a widely accepted truth in marketing that you have to announce about your every new product to people who could be interested in it. Even though we are not some PR company and thus naturally can’t distribute news to every corner of related business areas about updates of your new products, however the Mailer will help you to reach people who will be 100% interested in whatever you have to say: people who ordered something from you in the past and your business partners who promote your other products.

Just let me mention some things that are told via the Mailer by our merchants:

a) to their customers:

• exclusive discounts for some of their products;
• launch of new products;
• updates of previously purchased products;
• changes in current policies;

b) to their affiliates:

• new promotional materials added;
• exclusively increased affiliate commissions;
• notifications about new upcoming products;
• general updates about current products or sales;

The very last my mentioned point is especially useful when you want to keep your business neat and avoid situations when you make some changes in your products or services, but your affiliates keep promoting old versions.

HOW TO USE THE MAILER?

It is very easy: just log in to your Click2Sell account, go to “For Merchant” section and click on “Mailer” link in the main menu.

All of the fields are self explanatory and you will be able to use a robust text editor to make your message look in any way you want.

Do not hesitate to try various options by sending test messages to yourself (just find “Send Test Email” section there). You can send as many test emails to your specified email address as you want.

Please note that you can send only 2 messages per week to your customers or affiliates, so make sure that you tell them everything you want in every message you send.

We are open to hear your opinions or suggestions about the Mailer (or any other feature in Click2Sell). Just drop us a message and let’s discuss about your suggestion!