Shopify Affiliate Program Review: Is It Worth It?

E-commerce platforms are increasingly common these days, with most people turning online to make their day to day purchases. Shopify has gained popularity because it provides a user-friendly digital version of what traditional retail stores do. If you wish to earn money through affiliate marketing, then the Shopify Affiliate program is something you would want to look into.

The Shopify Affiliate Program is worth it if you can help drive traffic to Shopify’s website. You can use your website or blog to refer potential customers to Shopify. If your referral purchases a standard plan, you get a commission of $58. This goes up to $2000 for a Shopify Plus account.

In this article, you will learn more about the Shopify affiliate program, specifically about:

How to become a Shopify affiliate
How to make money using the Shopify affiliate program
Pros and cons of the Shopify affiliate program
Tools and training
Support provided by the Shopify affiliate program

What Is Shopify Affiliate Program?

Shopify affiliate program allows for affiliate marketing through collaboration with the Shopify merchant. The affiliate drives in potential customers to the merchant’s website and keeps track of the referral through a tracking software.

When the referral translates into business, if one of the potential customers ends up buying a Shopify product or service, then the affiliate who referred that customer to Shopify’s website earns a certain amount in commission.

This is a win-win situation for all involved. The customers get the services they are looking for, the affiliate gets a commission on the purchase made by the customer from Shopify’s site, and Shopify generates revenue from the sale.

In an effort to help more entrepreneurs with selling products online and spread more awareness about their business model, Shopify has come up with this referral program. Once you get approved as an affiliate by Shopify, you will be able to share affiliate links on your website to drive more traffic to Shopify.

In order to enhance your experience as an affiliate marketer, you will also be provided with banners and other things to help you bring in potential customers to Shopify’s site.

Related Post: What Is High Ticket Affiliate Marketing

Who Is This Program For?

The Shopify Affiliate Program is tailored to allow anyone with a website, blog, or microblog to become an affiliate.

Generally, anyone who has an audience who can use a solution like Shopify can become an affiliate under the Shopify affiliate program. Anyone looking to build their audience base consisting of people who might need a solution like Shopify can also become an affiliate.

This program is for entrepreneurs who are looking for an e-commerce solution to set up their shops online. If you know someone who would benefit from this solution, you can become an affiliate, guide them over to Shopify’s site, and earn a commission once this person signs up for a membership with Shopify.

Shopify is the digitized version of the traditional retail stores we have been going to for years. As the market evolves with the changing times, online shopping will soon become the normal way of doing business.

Retailers are moving online, and Shopify is helping them with this move. The Shopify affiliate program is designed to help transition more such business owners to an online presence.

The affiliate program will help educate entrepreneurs on the many advantages of having an online shop with Shopify and the benefits of having an e-commerce solution. It will help them sell their products and services online or through a point of sale in person.

How to Become an Affiliate Under the Shopify Affiliate Program?

To become an affiliate marketer under the Shopify affiliate program, you will need to fill out an application form. Your application should include details of an active website that you currently run, and how you intend to promote their products.

You can provide them sample content explaining how you intend to run the affiliate campaigning. This is basically to give them an idea of what you have to offer.

It will be an added advantage if you are able to explain in detail your skills and experience with regards to affiliate marketing, as this will give them an idea of how you intend to promote Shopify.

The affiliate management team will then review the form at Shopify. On receiving approval from the affiliate management team, you are free to begin your affiliate marketing.

The process is pretty simple and straightforward. You can find the form by going to this page. On successful completion and approval of this application, you can start with your affiliate marketing for Shopify and earn commission by doing so.

The commission can fall in the range of $58 for average sales and may go up to $2000 when someone buys a Shopify plus membership using your referral.

You can also read up the book “Shopify” by Brian Smith to help guide your visitors to create an online business or an e-commerce store and encourage them to start making money online with their own products and brands or through drop shipping.

Check Out A Complete List Of My Favorite Affiliate Programs

How to Generate Income With the Help of Shopify Affiliate Program?

Now that you know how the affiliate program works and how you sign up to be an affiliate under this program, you will need to learn how to generate income using the Shopify affiliate program.

The first step in this process is to build a website to make sure that you have a steady source of audience who regularly visit your site.
Then you will have to add a funnel or a landing page for your visitors.
Parallel to the two steps above, you will also have to create relevant content for your audience members so that they continue to visit your website or blog consistently.
The next step is to attract those potential customers looking for an e-commerce solution for their businesses. You can do this by creating content and ads that talk about Shopify and how having an account with Shopify will help build their e-commerce stores.
As an add on, you can also educate the potential customers on what Shopify does to help achieve entrepreneurs’ goals and how they can also get this help just by clicking on the link on your web page.

Once all this is done, and you have helped move traffic to Shopify’s merchant site, you will now be able to earn a commission when your referral purchases a membership with Shopify.

It has been seen that the affiliates are most successful in generating income by creating content on the following mediums:

Blogs
Vlogs
Video tutorials
Email lists
Online guides
Webinars

Apart from this, doing specific content on e-commerce and other digital platform reviews and comparisons will also help generate a large audience base of individuals who may be keen on opening an account with Shopify.

The Tools and Training Provided by This Affiliate Program

Shopify ensures that you are well equipped with all the knowledge that you will need to be able to carry out your affiliate marketing program well. To that end, Shopify provides affiliate marketing training.

On Shopify’s site, once you have been approved as an affiliate, you will be able to peruse the Affiliate Marketing Fundamentals course. By signing up for this course, you can understand in detail the image Shopify is trying to create and gain a more in-depth understanding of Shopify’s products and services.

In addition to this, Shopify also has an affiliate blog where you can get more up-to-date information about the platform and, in general, a guide to affiliate marketing. You can access the blog by visiting this page.

The blog also provides information regarding any product updates that the Shopify partners may need to be aware of.

Overall, the blog is a great place to learn more about Shopify’s products, be notified of any latest development on the platform, and glean any marketing material that you can use for your affiliate marketing campaign for Shopify.

Shopify Affiliate Program: Support

The Shopify affiliate program also provides great support to the affiliates by means of providing their affiliates with an affiliate manager.

The affiliate manager will help you learn the ropes as you try to make your mark in the Shopify affiliate program.

This is a great advantage to you as an affiliate of Shopify as there are hardly any other such affiliate programs that assign a designated affiliate manager to their affiliates. The benefits of having a manager assigned to you are manifold.

Affiliate managers have a clearer understanding of what works for Shopify and will guide you on that. You can also benefit from their experience and learn more about the e-commerce platform in general, bounce content and ad ideas related to Shopify off of them to get a feel of whether it will work with your audience or not.

An affiliate manager will also help you with any queries you may have regarding the tracking tools and any general queries regarding the affiliate program

Trial Conversion Benefits Allotted to Affiliate

Since Shopify also has a trial program, visitors may not always directly convert to a paid membership. Rather they would want to use the trial version and then decide to take up the membership at a later date.

A free trial is offered for up to 14 days at Shopify, and visitors can then convert to paid accounts. If the visitor had used the referral of the affiliate to come to the Shopify website, and then signed up for the trial version, then the referral will remain valid till the end of the trial period.

The commission will become due when the visitor converts from the trial version to a proper account. This means that the referral will remain valid for the entire 14 days of the trial period. The commission amount will get credited once the trial account gets converted to an actual account.

What More Can You Do to Increase Your Income From the Shopify Affiliate Program?

In order to generate more income from Shopify, you will need to first generate more traffic who will find the product you are asking them to sign up to be relevant for their business. To do this, you will have to:

Write information-rich blog posts, or create content using other mediums that are just as descriptive in order to educate your audience on the perks of signing up with Shopify.
Use keywords cleverly in your posts. You can do this by using the search words that your target audience uses for looking up solutions to their e-commerce-related problems online. For instance, if the most searched words for e-commerce related queries include the terms “set up online shop” or “find online stores,” use these words in your posts so that they appear as top search results when they search using these keywords again.
You can also offer to set up e-commerce shops for your clients with your Shopify partnership. This way, you will also get affiliate and theme and app-related commissions from Shopify every time the customer wants to use the theme or use an app for their store because those sales would also be considered funneled in from your site.
Do not underestimate the power of social media. Social media has made the job much simpler now. There are microblogs that you can post on your social media sites that link directly to Shopify’s site. You can use this method to generate more traffic or share deep Shopify links to get more people to subscribe to Shopify.

This video walks you through the Shopify affiliate program, explaining how it is more lucrative than many people may think at first glance:

Shopify Is Extremely User Friendly

Shopify is extremely user-friendly, making it a great place for your customers to shop without the hassle of figuring out what the next step needs to be or how the flow of transactions is structured.

Oftentimes, a muddled method for signing up is a deterrent of sales. Many customers who find it difficult to navigate the site may decide not to proceed with the transaction, and the sales will suffer in the process.

Shopify understands the risks of having a complicated interface, and so it has invested in making its site as user friendly as possible.

Shopify not only makes it easy for the end customers, but it also makes things easier for you as an affiliate to navigate through its portal. In fact, Shopify goes that extra mile and adds a link to an article that will be relevant and helpful to the current page or functionality you are exploring on Shopify.

The articles help you get quick answers to any questions you may have regarding the affiliate program. The pages on Shopify include i-buttons that are self-explanatory, and navigating around the site becomes quite simple and straightforward for both the merchant and the affiliate.

Without this ease of doing business that Shopify promotes, having an e-commerce shop or any digital presence would be a very painful process.

The ease of navigating the site will ensure that customers with the intent of making a purchase using the site can actually make the purchases and not become frustrated in the process.

A higher rate of subscription is also good for you as an affiliate. The more the visitors convert to customers, the more commission you will be earning.

Check Out My Completely Free High Ticket Affiliate Marketing Training

Advantages of the Shopify Affiliate Program

There are many distinct advantages of the Shopify affiliate program. They not only take care of the merchants who sign up to create an account, but there are multiple benefits extended to the affiliates as well.

Here is a list of all the things that help you a great deal in being successful as an affiliate marketer using the Shopify affiliate program:

It Assigns an Affiliate Manager

As discussed in the previous section, Shopify assigns an affiliate manager to you. This is an added advantage as many other affiliate programs do not provide an affiliate manager.

Having an affiliate manager will ensure that you learn more about the business and shed some light on how you can improve your affiliate marketing practices in relation to Shopify to generate more sales and hence more commission as a consequence.

This is a great advantage, and anyone who wants to take up the business of affiliate marketing seriously with Shopify will benefit a lot from their affiliate manager’s guidance.

It Offers Great Products

As a Shopify Affiliate, you will be marketing some truly great products. These products have been designed, keeping in mind the current market ecology and how it is evolving online. Entrepreneurs will see the benefit of opening a Shopify account in order to be able to set up their online businesses.

Shopify ensures that all their products help the entrepreneurs who set up a shop using Shopify to succeed in their endeavors. They do this by providing support in addition to great quality products and solutions on the online platform.

It Has a Great Conversion Funnel Optimization

Conversion optimized funnel is critical for online businesses. It can be the difference between your website being successful and generating large amounts of sales or struggling to keep up with the maintenance costs.

A conversion funnel is a visualized diagram of the path that visitors to your site follow before they are converted to a customer. Think of it more like a funnel with a broad top that gradually becomes narrower as traffic gets thinner depending on the relevance of the content, in relation to the crowd until it finally tapers to the small percentage that converts to customers.

If there is conversion funnel optimization, like Shopify has, it ensures a greater return on investment for the marketing campaigns. As an affiliate marketer for Shopify, this is great news as the number of visitors that can get converted to actual customers is high.

It Educates Its Customers on Its Products

This is perhaps the biggest help that Shopify can do for its customers and its affiliate marketers. Shopify allows potential customers to interact with Shopify’s software, try it out and learn more about the benefits of Shopify by directly interacting with it.

For educating potential customers, this is the most effective way as the potential customer can see how helpful the software will be for their business. In many ways, this helps the affiliate marketer because most of the selling process ensures that the customer is well informed about the product, and Shopify does this work for the marketer very well.

Many times a site visit does not convert into sales because of a lack of information. The solution that the potential customer may be seeking will already be there in the product. However, because it is not clearly mentioned or easily understood, it becomes a missed opportunity when it comes to sales.

Allowing customers to interact with the software is a novel way of educating the customers on what is new in the market and how the software will give them ease of doing business. Thus, it helps them decide based on hard facts and true experience rather than what they hear or read on a blog.

Of course, the website or blog of the affiliate marketer will help drive the traffic to Shopify, but then converting that traffic to a customer becomes much easier because of this approach that Shopify has. In turn, it helps generate more sales and more commission for the affiliate.

It Has a High Commission and Fast Pay-Out

Shopify pays a minimum of $58 on average. The commission amount can go as high up as $2000 if the customer has opted for a Shopify Plus account.

The pay-out is fast as well. You are eligible for payment whenever your balance is greater than $25, and you get paid twice a month through PayPal.

Payment Is on Time

As and when an affiliate qualifies for a payment, Shopify ensures that the affiliate is paid on time. The general rule is that the affiliate should have a minimum balance of $25 in their account to be able to qualify for a pay-out.

As soon as this threshold amount is reached, the pay-out is done to the affiliate using a PayPal account. The usual feedback from affiliates is that Shopify always pays its affiliates on time.

Embedding the Affiliate Link Is Easy

In order to drive traffic from your website to Shopify’s site, you will need to embed the affiliate link on your website. This link will help track the traffic from your website and help you get paid once they sign up for a Shopify account.

Embedding the affiliate link is as easy as copy and pasting a piece of text. You can embed the link to any page, microblog, vlog description section, website, or your blog and be able to earn commission every time a user converts to a Shopify customer.

Disadvantages of the Shopify Affiliate Program

It is important to know the advantages and understand the disadvantages of the affiliate program to make a fully informed decision.

Here you will find a list of the disadvantages of the affiliate program and the caveats you need to bear in mind before you choose the Shopify affiliate program:

It Does Not Give Recurring Commissions

Recurring commissions are a great way to generate passive income as it allows you to earn money for your past actions. For instance, if you helped bring a customer to a site for a particular subscription for a period, every time the customer renews their subscription, you will get a commission.

Unfortunately, this is not the case with Shopify, and recurring commissions are not offered here. This means that your income levels may fluctuate on a month on month basis and be solely dependent on the new customers you bring to the site.

No Public Incentive for High Sales Volume

Unlike what many other companies provide, Shopify does not reward its affiliates with public incentives or market shares, or other rewards for generating a high sales volume. It is only the commission amount that is awarded, no matter the scale of the sale.

As an affiliate, you can earn $2000 for every user who converts into a customer and opts for the Shopify plus account. If there is a large volume of sales, then the amount earned will also be multiplied that many times over, which is quite a large sum in and of itself.

Conclusion

If your audience is interested in e-commerce or even drop-shipping, then you can drive them to Shopify, where they can realize their vision. The Shopify affiliate program is not just trending right now.

It is also setting itself up for the future. With online marketing becoming the new normal, Shopify is looking at becoming the go-to place for entrepreneurs to set up shop through this virtual medium.

The Shopify affiliate program is a great opportunity to help generate business for the online community and also earn a hefty sum along the way.