Affiliate is the only channel where you set the price of a sale before you pay for it. That makes it the right first channel for a small catalogue with thin margins, and the right stabiliser for a large one where paid media has already reached diminishing returns. We treat it as an economic system rather than a listing exercise: commission tiers, attribution windows, publisher mix and exclusion rules are all levers that decide whether the programme adds incremental revenue or simply reprices sales you would have made anyway.
For small catalogues the work is concentrated on positioning and publisher fit. Five to two hundred SKUs cannot support a broad voucher-led programme, so we build around content publishers, comparison placements and creators whose audience matches the product, with commission set high enough to earn placement and low enough to stay profitable after returns. For large catalogues the work moves to data engineering: feeds are cleaned, categorised, deduplicated and enriched so that thousands of products carry accurate stock, price, EAN and delivery data, because a broken feed silently kills the top of every publisher's ranking.
Once live, the programme is managed against contribution margin per publisher, not gross revenue. We monitor brand bidding, coupon leaks, cookie-stuffing and last-click hijacking, negotiate placements rather than accept rate cards, and rebalance the voucher, cashback and content split each month. Every publisher earns its position from incremental value, and any partner that cannot demonstrate it gets renegotiated or removed.