By Simon Jones

Most online sellers work with affiliates, who market products and services in a variety of ways and earn their income through revenue shares. Affiliates themselves may use any number of different ways to attract new prospects and customers – ranging from Pay-per-Click Google campaigns through email newsletters, blog networks and many others.

What affiliates and the merchants with whom they partner have in common, without fail is this: they’re all in it to make money.

Affiliate marketing is not a pastime that generates beauty, or adds to the human trove of knowledge. Rather, it matches an intricate understanding of the Internet to great advertising skills to uncover otherwise invisible veins of buyer opportunity that primary merchants otherwise might struggle to tap into. Similarly, merchants partner with affiliates purely for the purpose of driving more revenues.

As a result, anything that makes the relationship or the process less efficient creates a negative impact at the very heart of the endeavor. Such inefficiencies are known as friction, so anything that can be done to improve efficiency is known as eliminating friction – with a goal of creating a frictionless relationship and selling process.

Even though affiliates and merchants have the shared goal of creating frictionless relationships, it is often surprising how little most affiliate networks do to support this goal. While they provide an adequate avenue for merchants and affiliates to find one another, more than often the services provided to smooth the financial relationship create more problems than they solve. Merchants have to put up money ahead of results; affiliates may have to submit invoices; whole programs may get suspended when merchants’ accounts temporarily run low on, or out of, available funds.

To solve this problem, Plimus offers an affiliate program that does more than match affiliates and merchants – it also manages the finances and eliminates billing and accounting friction. Simply, the merchant makes its sales through the Plimus e-commerce platform for a very small fee (usually between 4.5% and 10% of the transaction total), then Plimus takes on the responsibility of distributing goods to the customer, then dividing and distributing the revenues between merchant and affiliate. In this way, both partners know what they’re getting and when, and no campaign runs the risk of mid-term cancellation due to low funds: revenues are only available when a sale is actually made.

Merchants find other flexible elements boost and accelerate their affiliate marketing programs. For instance, each affiliate can be auto-approved for campaigns, or require approval for each campaign - at the merchant’s preference. Different affiliates can have different commission rates – and the merchant always knows contact and sales information for each affiliate partner. And new campaigns can quickly and easily be designed, rolled out and executed without the need for expensive and sparse technical resources.

To find out more, visit Plimus at www.plimus.com.