Do you want to boost your online sales? A well-designed affiliate program can bring hordes of buyers to your site. Good affiliate sites have a heavy traffic of relevant visitors who would be interested in buying your products.

What is an affiliate program?
An affiliate program is an arrangement with other websites. Under this arrangement, the other website, known as the affiliate website, redirects part of its traffic to your site. This is done by displaying and promoting links to the pages on your website or your products.

When a user on the affiliate website clicks on this link, the user is redirected to your website. This link also passes an "affiliate id" to your website, using which you can identify which affiliate website the user came from. If this user buys any product on your website, you pay a commission to the affiliate. This commission can be a percentage of the sale value. The payment is made either immediately or at regular intervals. For more information on implementing a successful affiliate program on your website, check out this article that describes a development strategy for affiliate programs.

The main problem with affiliate payments is that you have to initiate payments manually based on a commission report that would typically be generated by your e-store software. If your affiliates run into hundreds or thousands, this process can get very tedious.

Luckily, there is a way out. PayPal (http://www.paypal.com) has a solution called MassPay.

What is MassPay?
Simply put, MassPay is a solution from PayPal that helps automate affiliate payments. Instead of having to manually enter the affiliate amounts into the payment system, your e-store software generates a MassPay file that contains the details of the payments to be made. This file is in a pre-specified format and can be generated by a scheduled task on your server.

Once this file is generated, you just upload it using your PayPal MassPay screen. PayPal processes the payments automatically. The only requirement is that all your affiliates need to have a PayPal account.

For more details on how to generate the MassPay file, see this excellent article on the SuperFreaker site - http://www.superfreaker.com/paypal/affiliate.asp
For more details on PayPal visit - http://www.PayPal.com

If what you've read matches with your requirements, please contact us and share your ideas. Or if you'd like to read more about our services and see if what we offer interests you, please click here.