2nd Tier Affiliates- Can RAP or 1 Shopping Cart Do This?

RAP can but it doesn't work too well. Since RAP does instant commissions your second tier affiliates get paid quite a way down the commission line. For Backlink Flood I give a 15% 2nd tier but my affiliate recruiters don't get anything until the 4th sale an affiliate makes and a lot of affiliates are only good for one or two. If you offer 10% or less then they don't get a credit for something like 8 sales.

To make up for this I have separate deals with some of my best recruiters whereby I remove them from getting direct credit and instead calculate a monthly payout for them based on the sales they've driven.

Brad,

RAP will do 2 tier and works quite well.

Thanks,

John

Forget his math. RAP handles it for you. He's just pulling numbers out of the air.

Here's the main factor in your choice between using something like RAP and other options/approaches:

RAP pays affiliates immediately (relatively speaking) and you don't have to lift a finger. If your PayPal account gets hosed for some reason, you're not left scrambling to pay your affiliates, because they get paid directly. And you don't have to deal with the accounting aspects if any of your affiliates earns more than $600 a year -- the IRS wants you to report them.

The trade-off is the way that RAP works: it makes full (100%) payments, but it divvies them up depending on payment ratios. In general, for 50% commissions, it alternates payments between the vendor and each affiliate. If there's a 2nd-Tier and/or an Equity Partner, then payments get divvied-up as needed. It's like dealing cards: the more players there are, the longer it takes to get the next card. But you get a WHOLE card, not a piece of a card. Make sense?

For the earlier poster to say it takes a while for 2nd Tier people to get paid ... is it more than 45-60 days? That's typically how long it takes affiliates to be paid from systems where the vendor has to cut checks and mail them out.

As long as people are promoting your product and you've got traffic and sales, affiliates will get paid. As traffic dies down, there will be fewer sales, and affiliates will get paid less frequently. It's not like it's a problem! In fact, that's the nature of things. The alternative is your affiliates waiting 45-60 days. Personally, I prefer to get paid sooner rather than later. What about you?

Ever heard this saying: "In theory, there's very little difference between theory and practice. But in practice, they're very different!"

The main problem with 2-tier promotions is exactly what you're saying here: you get a bunch of affiliates scrambling to sign up hoardes of people, and nobody is selling anything!

The other problem is that it's really best NOT to promote your affiliate program until AFTER someone has purchased your product. Why? Because the FTC has major issues with promotions that seem to focus mainly on recruiting rather than sales.

The nice thing about RAP is that you can set it to restrict affiliate payments to only customers. Also, the latest version has an Aff sign-up form right on the download page. So there's really no need to promote the affiliate program anywhere in your publically-visible sales materials. This ensures two things:

1) you WILL make lots of sales; and

2) you won't have to worry (as much) about the FTC bugging you!

-David

Sorry, apologies about the math in the above comment. I haven't run a 10% 2nd tier, this was based purely on feedback from some of my affiliates/recruiters.

I should've made that clearer above.

Andy