Why do I need to have an affiliate program?
That's an easy question to answer! Traffic, Customers, Revenues! Without these a e-business would cease to exist. It is not enough to have a beautiful web site offering top of the line products or services. People need to know you exist and where to find you. You need people to go to your web site. In a nutshell, what you need is traffic!

One of the best ways is to set up your own Pay-for-Performance rewards program (popularly known as the affiliate program). With Zeus Design's Easy Store Builder, you can have your own Pay-for-Performance rewards program up and running in no time!

Who should setup a Pay-for-Performance (Pay per click) program?.
Those interested in doing any of the following :

• Create brand awareness for your products or services
• Increasing revenue
• Tracking the performance of various advertising channels
• Increasing web traffic to your business website
• Assurance the advertisement worth the investment, [ because you only pay your affiliates for click-through, leads or sales]
• Creating a value-added service members only by offering them a Referral/Rewards program

There are many more reasons to set up a pay-for -performance program. Suffice to say,if you want more hits to your web site, more customers for your business, you should setup a Pay-for-Performance program of your own.

"With a traditional ad on [television] you're buying real estate - a block of time. But you don't know how many people will show up, or how many respond positively," he said. "[Banner ads eliminate] the risk that no one shows up, because you only pay for those that see the banner, but there is still the risk they may not respond positively. An affiliate program eliminates the rest of that risk, you only pay for performance" - ZDNews

Affiliate Software Features: Some of the below features are now standard solutions. Any of the existing capability may be extended through customization.

• Graphical representation of referrals, unique referrals, and commissions.
• Pay affiliates on ANY time schedule.
• Export data into a text file in ANY FORMAT!
• Clear, user-friendly interfaces.
• Concise printable payout reports from your browser.
• Now you can track and reward up to 12 levels of commissions to your affiliates.
• EASY to setup, integrates with a variety of billing systems
• The signup and stats login pages are customizable.
• More customization with headers and footers on ALL stats pages.
• Flexible signup form requirement - you can remove most fields.
• Now automatically builds replicated web sites for your affiliates. (This feature requires some knowledge of Perl and HTML to implement)
• Includes script to help build dynamically created order forms to insert the affiliate's code
• Works invisibly to the average customer - they won't know they were tracked!
• Ability to email all your affiliates easily - plus you can customize the emails with their names!
• Search your affiliates - add, edit, or delete them easily from your browser.
• Easily add, edit, and delete commissions as well.
• All of the available fraud prevention techniques are incorporated into the program.
• View GRAPHICAL stats of the referrals, unique referrals, and sales by year, month, or day!
• Easily process commissions for recurring billing for subscription based sites.
• EXPORT your data to all the popular check printing programs.
• Insert the referring affiliate's name into HTML pages.
• MySQL database is extremely simple to set up. ALL DONE IN YOUR BROWSER!