After making a strong debut at the 2009 Rails Rumble, Affiliapp may make adding an affiliate marketing program to ecommerce businesses easier and potentially less expensive.
Affiliapp, a Rails Rumble project, was developed by Scott Meade, who is also the developer that helped bring this site, Ecommerce Developer, to life and who still supports our site and our sister site, Practical Ecommerce.
Affiliate marketing is, perhaps, one of the most important ways that your ecommerce clients can promote their stores and encourage traffic growth. So being able to offer an easy-to-implement affiliate marketing solution might just be the sort of competitive advantage you can use to win new business.
While there are certainly a number of excellent affiliate networks that you could use to boost your client's traffic—Commission Junction and LinkShare being the best known examples—many of these programs require your client to make an up-front deposit of several thousand dollars into an escrow account that is then used to pay affiliates as they drive business to your client's store. Affiliapp offers an alternative to these sorts of networks: It doesn't require your client to make a significant upfront investment; rather your client can pay affiliates as they generate sales.
While it is important to note that Affiliapp does not come with an already-in-place network of site owners willing to promote your client's business, it is one more thing you can offer to clients when you bid for new business or upgrades. In either case, using a solution like Affiliapp could help you win new business.
About The Rails Rumble
Affiliapp was born as part of the 2009 Rails Rumble, a two-day competition during which 1-to-4 person teams of web developers design, develop, and deploy their best web application from scratch using Ruby on Rails.
Each new application was supposed to have a clear business model and offer real value, as Affiliapp clearly did.
Editor's Note: If you have an application that you believe could help other developers, please let us know via our site contact form.
