If you've been scrolling social media lately, you've probably noticed Shopee affiliate links everywhere, and even YouTube videos now drop commission links straight into their descriptions. "Affiliate marketing" has started showing up a lot more in Taiwan's public conversation. So what actually is affiliate marketing? Why is it suddenly everywhere? And what commercial opportunity are brands seeing in it? This article should clear up some of the confusion.

The concept

The idea behind affiliate marketing is surprisingly simple: a brand gives a publisher a tracking link, and whenever a customer buys something through that link, the publisher earns a commission.

At first glance this looks a lot like the referral programs many e-commerce sites already run. The key difference is that publishers get real money, not site credit or coupons. That single difference changes who ends up promoting your product: not just existing customers, but all kinds of independent media with their own traffic.

You don't need to negotiate and sign a contract with each partner individually. As long as the traffic owner thinks your affiliate offer is worth their time, they'll join on their own and start sending you traffic and conversions.

In the past, most traffic sat with big ad agencies or talent agencies, and affiliate marketing mostly showed up in blog posts. Today, traffic comes from everywhere: video creators, community managers, niche accounts scattered across every platform. Negotiating a one-off sponsorship deal with each of them individually is slow and expensive. That's the real reason affiliate marketing is back in the spotlight.

How it works

Running an affiliate program comes down to four main pieces: platform setup, pricing strategy, partner recruitment, and partner management.

Each of these involves a fair amount of know-how. This article only covers the basics of each piece; I'll go into the operational details in future posts.

1. Platform setup

There are three types of affiliate systems:

① Large affiliate networks (like ALLIS, Channel King, or CrackRevenue)

These work a bit like a job board: both brands and publishers register on the platform, brands post their commission terms, and publishers pick the offers that look profitable. The upside is that it's simple and low effort. The downside is that platform rules can be restrictive, and local platforms often rely on plain UTM links for tracking, which means you're exposed to lost attribution and fraudulent traffic gaming your commissions. Advanced setups are hard to support this way.

② Affiliate SaaS platforms (like Affise, Voluum, Everflow, or Offer18)

These help you build a dedicated affiliate system with more flexibility and stronger fraud protection. They rely on server-to-server postbacks for data transfer, so accuracy is high, and refunds or order status changes sync in real time, which avoids the awkward situation of paying commission on an order the customer already returned. The overseas SaaS options are quite mature at this point, some even integrate directly with Meta and Google, so ad agencies can run campaigns through the affiliate system itself.

③ Building your own tracking system

This gives you the most control, but also the highest barrier to entry. Building and maintaining it yourself often costs far more than just paying for a SaaS system, so I won't go into detail here.

2. Pricing strategy

Since the whole system runs on commissions, figuring out the right payout rate and bonus structure is usually the biggest headache for brands. It touches gross margin, customer lifetime value, and how much room you actually have to give away.

A common digital ad benchmark in Taiwan targets ROAS around 3 (revenue roughly triple the ad spend), which converts to an affiliate commission of about 33%. That's a high number, especially once you factor gross margin into your ROI calculation and see exactly how much of it your ad spend is eating.

Publishers also vary a lot in scale, so you need different commission tiers for different levels. If you set the starting rate too high, you won't have room left to reward your top partners, and you'll end up losing your best traffic.

For this reason, I'd recommend starting with CPA (cost per action) pricing, for two reasons:

  • For the brand, costs are easy to control.
  • For the publisher, they can estimate their potential earnings without even knowing the brand's average order value.

Beyond a basic CPA rate, you can also layer in bonus structures to boost results. For example:

Product CPA: NT$300 + first-purchase bonus: NT$300 + signup bonus: NT$20

A lower-threshold action like signup gives publishers an early taste of success and gets them willing to test the waters, then you guide them toward higher-value conversions like a first purchase, building their confidence in promoting you step by step. At the end of the day, the whole point of marketing is acquiring new customers.

3. Partner recruitment

Whichever system you choose, you still need to put real effort into recruiting partners. Even on a platform that already has plenty of publishers, brands need to go out and actively pursue partners to gather enough data to optimize the program.

Publishers generally fall into four categories: website owners, media-buying agencies, KOLs, and community managers.

The fastest way to find partners: start from your competitors.

  • Search competitor keywords on Google, find review articles or media sites that already recommend them, and send outreach emails one by one.
  • Search directly for your product type or service category to find sites in your space that already have traffic.
  • Search social platforms for KOLs and KOCs with an established following.
  • Use LinkedIn. It's a good way to reach affiliate or digital ad agencies that can bring in a large volume of traffic at once.

What matters in an outreach email:

The email needs to cover everything a publisher would want to know: commission structure, your site's data and conversion rate, target audience, and so on. The goal is for them to estimate their potential earnings just from reading the email, so they actually have a reason to follow up.

4. Partner management

Affiliate marketing follows the 80/20 rule clearly: 20% of publishers generate 80% of revenue. Given that, building trust with your publishers matters enormously.

Transparency comes first

Publishers' biggest fear is lost conversions, doing the work and getting nothing for it. Check your tracking match rate regularly, and make sure site updates don't break the affiliate system.

Tier your partners

Review traffic quality regularly and set up a clear tier system, so your best partners earn more and maybe even get exclusive promotional offers.

Keep partners informed

Send partners regular updates on current promotions, bestselling products, and which creative formats are performing best. This isn't just a resource for them, it also nudges them to refresh their content and keep their creative from going stale.

It's also worth periodically checking your partners' sites and channels. If you spot outdated content, flag it right away, and keep a two-way, real-time line of communication open so the brand stays top of mind for them.

Conclusion: tracking data and building trust, together

At its heart, affiliate marketing is decentralized performance marketing: turning scattered pockets of traffic into actual revenue. Succeeding at it takes more than hard technical infrastructure or soft relationship skills alone. You need both, working together.

The whole system's success really comes down to two things:

The foundation: technical and margin infrastructure
A reliable system, whether that's basic UTM tracking or server-to-server postbacks, gives you transparent attribution, paired with a tiered CPA-based pricing strategy. Together, these make sure every conversion gets credited accurately, while protecting brand margin and publisher earnings on the business side.

On top of that: trust and relationships
Recruiting and managing partners is really just B2B sales and customer success by another name. No matter how good your system is, the traffic still comes from people. Regular updates, dedicated resources, and honest two-way communication are what actually keep the top 20% of publishers, the ones driving 80% of your revenue, around for the long run.