ShareASale is one of the most popular and big names in Affiliate Marketing. Anyone in the sphere of Affiliate Marketing would have heard of ShareASale. They have been around for almost 20 years now and have more merchants than 4000 merchants signed up with them! That is pretty impressive.
In 2017, ShareASale was acquired by another Affiliate Network giant Awin. Though it has been close to 3 years since the acquisition, nothing has changed significantly in ShareASale. It runs on the same website as it always as and with the same features.
ShareASale is one of the most trusted affiliate networks out there. I will provide you with both pros and cons in this review. But first, let us look at how ShareASale works.
Related post: Top 8 Affiliate Marketing Networks
Table of Contents
How does ShareASale work?
For those who are new to ShareASale, let me give a small intro about them. ShareASale is an affiliate network that connects merchants and affiliates. Merchants are those who looking to sell products and affiliates are people who promote these products and earn commission by doing so. Through affiliate marketing, the merchant ends up selling more products and as a result making more money. The affiliate earns money by simply promoting the product. It’s a win-win. ShareASale facilitates this whole process.
So, multiple merchants are offering various affiliate programs in ShareASale. To work with these merchants, you have to individually apply to each one of them who you want to work with. Every merchant has their own commission rates and criteria for selecting affiliate marketers to work with. Some merchants automatically accept affiliate marketers as well.
Reasons why people love ShareASale
Easy sign-up
The sign-up process with ShareASale is pretty easy and can be completed within 15 minutes. It is FREE. There are few key details you need to fill in like your contact details, billing information, and so on. You need to have an active website to be accepted into the network, so make sure you have one before you sign-up. That’s it. Once you submit it, you can sit back and wait for a couple of days.
Affiliate marketers are accepted usually within a day or two (might be slower if it’s weekend or holidays) and that is fast compared to many other affiliate networks out there.
Easy to use dashboard
When you look at the ShareASale dashboard for the first time, you might feel a little disappointed. It looks too old for today. That is because nothing much has been changed since the beginning of ShareASale. But don’t get fooled by the appearance. Their dashboard is functional, easy to use, and is packed with everything needed.
You have ‘At a Glance’ section where you can see all the recent updates and how many merchants you are working with are closed or offline. There are other options like ‘Activity Feed’ and more which will give you all the information you need to run your affiliate marketing business. It also shows the top 10 leading merchants so that you can check them out. How cool!
Clear cut payment cycle
One of the worst things about being self-employed is the fear of whether we will get paid or not or when we will get paid. It can be nerve-wracking especially if payment of bills depends on it. Affiliate Marketers go through this time and again. But the good news is, with ShareASale you don’t have to keep guessing about your payments. They follow a clear payment cycle.
ShareASale pays its affiliate marketers the 20th of every month. Say you have made some money through ShareASale till Jan 20th, you get money on Feb 20th. So, any money you make from Jan 20th to Feb 20th reaches you on March 20th. Got it?
There are some affiliate networks or programs that pay you every week but it comes with a lot of hassle. For example, if there are any returns or reverse, you might have to pay back from the money you have received.
Powerful search tools
Not only does ShareASale provide you with around 5000 merchants to choose from it also provides a powerful search tool to make sure that you fish out the right merchant for you. Other affiliate networks cannot compete with ShareASale when it comes to the searching options. It comes with so many filters and search settings. You can do much more than narrowing down your search to your niche with these tools.
You can sort affiliate program by options like lead commission, sale commission, click commission, 7-day EPC, cookie length, and more! You can also filter your search results by using various parameters like merchants you auto-approve, commission rate greater than, two-tier program, and more. Through this tool, you can find the merchants that you want without having to scroll through hundreds of merchants.
Good customer support
Most of the affiliate networks available out there focus to keep their merchants happy. In that process, they usually ignore their affiliate marketers. This could be seen in their non-availability to support to the affiliate marketers or payments according to the whim of the merchants.
ShareASale really cares about their affiliate marketers as much as they care about their merchants. Their good customer support for both parties makes it clear. The ShareASale customer support is ready to answer your questions through email and phone between 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM Central Time.
Deep-link building
Long links have found to be turn-downs for customers. But if you are a part of ShareASale you do not need to worry about as much. ShareASale allows you to customize your affiliate URLs into short links that are more attractive to your users. It also has easy sharing options that make sharing your affiliate links much easier.
Great for New Affiliate Marketers
I absolutely have to mention this one. ShareASale is a great place for new affiliate marketers to start making money. Many other affiliate programs focus on getting high-end merchants and have strict rules on who can become affiliate marketers with them. Pickier they are the lesser the chance of new affiliate being accepted.
ShareASale doesn’t restrict itself to big merchants. This way small merchants also benefit from the affiliate network and so does new affiliate marketers because the smaller merchants won’t be as picky. There are programs that automatically accept affiliate marketers. I mean isn’t that great?!
Things that ShareASale users don’t like about it
Minimum Pay-out and mode of payment
The minimum payout rate is $50, which is higher than many of the competing affiliate networks. While it doesn’t matter for the big affiliate marketers, it could be annoying for the newcomers as it could delay their first pay-out.
Another common complaint about ShareASale is that they don’t have PayPal as an option for payout. PayPal is one of the most famous ways of payment in online transactions, users who are used to PayPal would like that to be an option. The available options are direct deposit, mailed check, and Payoneer.
Programs could get deleted without your knowledge
As an affiliate marketer, you sign up for different affiliate programs and get links for those programs. You publish these links to your website and make money driving traffic and sales through that link. But what happens of that affiliate program gets deleted? Your links are rendered useless and are simply sitting there on your website.
People have complained that they have not been notified sometimes when programs get deleted leaving the links from it obsolete. This is a real hindrance and the affiliate marketers need to be informed when such things happen.
Pros and Cons
Now that we have gone through what users like and dislike about ShareASale in detail, let us put in down in a list of pros and cons for easy analysis.
Pros:
- A trusted and reliable affiliate network with thousands of merchants to choose from.
- It is free and easy to sign-up and easy to use.
- Clear cut payment cycle (20th of every month provided that you have earned the minimum payout).
- It is easy to find out the exact affiliate program that you want through their powerful search tools.
- Good customer support.
- Great for new affiliate marketers.
Cons:
- The minimum payout is $50 which is can be considered as high.
- They do not have PayPal as their payment option.
- Their dashboard (even though functional) looks ancient. It can come off as messy at times.
- Sometimes, the affiliate programs get deleted and the affiliate marketer is not notified about it.
Verdict
After going through the pros and cons, you might have made up your mind as to whether ShareASale is good for you or not.
While there are few areas in which ShareASale needs to improve, I have to say that ShareASale gets a big thumbs up from me as an affiliate marketer.
It covers major concerns like regular payments and customer support. The number of merchants you can choose from is amazing for an affiliate marketer. There are products in every niche that you can promote and make money off.
If you are looking to become an affiliate marketer my #1 suggestion is Wealthy Affiliate. Click here to know why.
I hope you found this article useful.
