It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed an affiliate program. I’ve been meaning to talk about this one for a while. It is the most recent addition to my affiliate programs.
You can sign up here. Before this, SheVibe had a program that was sort of manually run. You could get commissions, but there was no nice dashboard. I believe you have to be approved to the new setup, but that took a short while for me. The folks at SheVibe were excited for their new program, methinks.
Once you’re approved and logged in, you’ll see some information. Right now, I see an alert about having to sending my W-9. This is standard but I haven’t because I haven’t made any sales. There’s an address, but it would be nice to submit it electronically, which you can do with places like ShareASale. It also doesn’t look like your account will show you whether you submitted a W9 previously, which is always convenient.
The dashboard lists “Account Manage” information, but SheVibe hasn’t entered this information in the most useful way. They simply list the customer support email address and company name as the contact. A dedicated email address an actual name would be far more useful, especially to affiliate newbs.
I like seeing the statistics right away, and this is pretty standard. One thing that seems amiss is there is no “Banners” or “Get links” option in the navigation. I expected to find this under “Resources” in the nav, but this wasn’t the case. That has some other stuff.. that I’ll touch on later.
Banners and Links
To access banners and links, you actually have to click the offers link that only appears on the index. This is confusing to me. It would be even more so to someone who’s new at all this. On that page, you see your commissions amount. 15% is respectable; although, some retailers certainly offer higher payouts. You’ll also see your affiliate link here. I’d really like to see my affiliate link on the index. Most affiliate programs allow this for ease.
Your link is SheVibe.com/ followed by a number. Mine is “#oid=1008_1” for example. You can append this number to any page on the SheVibe store — not community — and your links will work. Nowhere on the page is this explained. Again, not user friendly. All this information really should be directly on the main page. Fortunately, the setup of the manually links was similar and you can simply search and replace those links as Epiphora explains here.
Under “Other Promotion Materials,” there’s a menu with banners. These are all the standard banners you’re used to. They’re split up individually and you can see the banner size, but they all display on one page and you can’t simply view them in groups by size. I’d like to see this feature.
There are no banners for specific promotions or products. If you want to link to these, you can grab the banners from SheVibe’s index or forum, but you’ll have to manually create those links. I find that I link to stores much more frequently when they update their creatives (links and banners) with promotions and products. Yes, you can link to any page on SheVibe. Yes, it only requires some copying and pasting. No, the affiliate program doesn’t encourage you to do so.
You can create campaigns by adjusting your URL by adding an underscore and then a short tag after it. For example, if I wanted to indicate that I am linking from Tumblr, I might use the link http://shevibe.com#oid=1008_1_Tumblr. This data will show up on this page with clicks showing immediately.
But let’s assume you get your links set up the way you like. In the resources section, there’s a tool to track your links. There’s also the link guard feature..
Affiliate Link Guard
The link guard is an interesting feature. Essentially, you can send your visitors to a link on your site that redirects to SheVibe’s main page. You cannot direct them to any other page, but this could be useful if you frequently link to the home page, which I do in giveaway posts and the like. There are three options to creating this page:
- HTML
- PHP
- Javascript
If you’re using WordPress, HTML will suffice. Copy your affiliate link into the form (the default option is your number but not the correct link). Choose “HTML ” and click “Submit.”
Open “file.hmtml” with your code/text editor. Notepad works fine. Copy the code and paste it into a new page. I’m simply calling mine “Shevibe” with post slug “shevibe.” After publishing this page, OfSexandLove.com/Shevibe redirects to my affiliate code. The HTML method isn’t instantaneous, so you’ll see my page load briefly before the redirect. However, this can be beneficial for SEO purposes. You could also create any HTML pages or edit any theme files to paste in the HTML, too.
You may be able to accomplish something similar with PHP, but WordPress is currently stripping the code out of my page despite the fact that I have Exec-PHP installed.
For most users, however, this isn’t going to be an important option.
Payment and Reports
SheVibe’s program has a low payout threshold of $25. Awesome! There’s no information about a cool off period; however. I’m not sure when payments occur. Or even how. There’s no options for payments and I didn’t enter a PayPal email, so I assume they cut a physical check.
This is ALL the information I get because I use custom links
The reports link breaks down traffic view link, banner program and time period. Stats update every week, so there’s definitely some lag with data. All my clicks appear but since I tend to use promotion banners and custom links, there’s no information for tracking my campaign success. As a whole, this is less useful than it could be.
And I guess that really sums up how I feel about this affiliate software. It works but it’s bare bones. It’s not user friendly to me, and it’s definitely not going to be for other users. A couple explanations within the dashboard would certainly go a long way, and I’ve love to see SheVibe be more encouraging with creatives.
If you want to check out the affiliate program for yourself, I encourage you to sign up.
I hadn’t considered most of these issues. Since joining SheVibe’s affiliate program, I find myself linking to them more often than my other affiliates simply because it’s so easy to create your links. I absolutely hate systems like ShareaSale where you have to log in and jump through hoops to create spammy looking affiliate links.
This is just personal preference but I actually link to places far more when they provide me code rather than me having to “create” it. Either way, the program doesn’t TELL you that you can, which is a big no-no.
Thanks for reviewing the program. It is definitely bare bones and was created as a courtesy to those who had been asking for one. It was never our intention to pimp this out – it’s just kinda there if you’re interested. I will definitely see if there is anything we can do about making it more user friendly, as we want to take care of the folks who have taken the time to sign up. We appreciate you taking the time to write this up!
thanks for stopping by, Sandra. With the vacancy left by some other programs, I think a lot of people want to promote SheVibe as a company that’s ethical, has good deals and a decent selection. Even if you don’t actively “pimp” it, a few options might make it a bit more attractive to newbs.
Absolutely! We’ve made some changes to the home page which hopefully address some concerns. Again, thanks for pointing these things out. To be honest, this was completely new territory for us and we totally appreciate the knowledge you provided. Thanks again!
I’ll check it out! Thanks!
I really appreciate all the information in this review. I had heard of affiliate programs before but didnt really know how they worked.
The software/platform really makes a difference, too.