LeadDyno Affiliate Marketing

Jan. 28, 2015

I am an e-commerce consultant and a Shopify site owner. I've used many affiliate platforms in the past and hoped that this would be the solution for our Shopify store. This platform is good overall in terms of feature sets, but the concept and definition of its use by the developers along with their pricing is what I am disappointed with. I initially signed up for their free plan which apparently only allowed 500 visitors a month. Once I exceeded that, I was asked to pay for the next plan at $49/mo. for 3K visitors. I've been signed up for less than a month and have only had one affiliate signup who hasn't even sent any traffic or sales since they were approved. That has nothing to do with this app, but I just needed to state this to make my point. Which is, they want to charge customers based on site visitors and e-mails collected from your site. First, the number of visitors have no importance to me unless they are generated by my active affiliates. Instead, they count a visitor coming from any source regardless if the source wasn't one of your affiliates. Second, they say that they collect e-mail addresses that also count towards your chosen plan. They say they collect these e-mail addresses so that you can market to them. The problem with all this is that a true affiliate program should be geared towards genuine affiliates who actually promote your site, services and products. Those who can actually refer new customers your way. They want you to invite all your customers to become affiliates and refer their friends, which is not what you setup an affiliate program for. There are other apps and programs more appropriate for those tasks such as customer loyalty programs and refer-a-friend apps. The last thing you want is for your customer to become an affiliate, earn points through your loyalty program, and also be able to use coupon codes - and earn an affiliate commission on their own purchases. You'll also want to do most, if not all, your e-mail marketing using other services geared towards e-mail marketing such as Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Rare, Windsor Circle, etc. You're not going to want to use affiliate software to compose and send your e-mail campaigns as it's never going to have the kind of features to maximize your e-mail campaigns. They justify the price stating that they're collecting usable data that I can act upon. But the data they're collecting could be had for free through your Shopify backend, a free Mailchimp account and a free Google Analytics account. I can point you to several free Shopify apps that would better serve your analytics, e-mail marketing, refer-a-friend, and loyalty programs for just about zero cost. It's insane that they're pricing isn't based only on actual affiliate-related business and revenues. I'm not going to pay $49+/mo. for data I already have and that's not because I don't yet have affiliates. Even if my affiliates were already generating revenue, pricing should be tied into revenue generated by affiliate sales, not mere visits and e-mail addresses. Not quite sure why other merchants are so accepting of this practice. To me, it's as if I signed up for one service, but being charged for another. Not happy at all especially after I've spent some time setting up the backend, program details and was just about to start marketing my program. Now I'm going to have to move it to another platform.