There are now a huge range of shopping cart and ecommerce platforms available to business owners who wish to sell product online. One factor or feature that might be a useful addition to a shopping cart is an affiliate tool.

An affiliate management program allows you to pay affiliates for introduced business. Affiliate marketing is a great way to add more sales and revenue to your business at very low risk – you only pay the affiliate when the product has been sold.

Affiliate shopping cart tools also fully integrate with your ecommerce processes so it can simply be a case of activating it in your admin panel and then filling in some details of the program and then simply promote it.

Having a shopping cart with an affiliate program tool also means that your program can be scalable. What do I mean by that? Well if you had a manual process to track and pay affiliates you would get stuck after say 5 or 10 affiliates. It would be a lot of work. With a web based tool, you can have hundred s of affiliates and depending on the platform you can even auto pay then each month via PayPal.

Things to think about

• Does the shopping cart have an affiliate module?
• Does the affiliate module have a means of electronically paying the affiliates?
• Does the affiliate module have a real time tracking facility for affiliates to login and get their stats
• If you are considering a standalone affiliate programme to bolt on to your existing shopping cart, is it compatible?

An affiliate marketing tool is a great feature of any shopping cart system. It might be worth investigating affiliate marketing options before choosing a shopping cart. You could save yourself time and money in the long run.

This guest post is by Jason Hulott is a 14 year veteran of affiliate marketing and Internet marketing. SpeedieAffiliates can help affiliate marketers and affiliate managers with a range of affiliate marketing services.