How to Set Up an Affiliate Marketing Program on Squarespace

In this guide, we’re going to set up a complete Squarespace affiliate marketing program using Peach’s.

This tutorial takes about ten minutes – after that, you’ll have your affiliate program up and running.

What is an affiliate marketing program?

An affiliate program lets you reward influential people for sending customers to you.

You pay a commission to your affiliates based on the sales they send to your Squarespace store.

Add bloggers, Instagrammers, YouTubes, and authors to your affiliate program. They’ll share your store with their audience. You’ll pay them a commission on any sales.

Why would you want an affiliate program?

Affiliate programs let you dramatically increase the reach of your store without buying expensive ads or running complicated marketing programs.

Say you know an influential person in your industry – a popular blogger, an Instagram personality, etc.

They’ve got a strong connection to your product – or maybe you send them a free sample.

You want to reward that person for sharing your product in a way that’s incredibly beneficial to you both.

But neither of you really know how much you should pay for a sponsored post (and sponsored posts are risky… what if they’ve bought fake followers?)

Instead, you add them to your affiliate program, and offer them a commission on any sales they send to you.

They share your products with their followers, their followers buy your products, you reward the affiliate.

What businesses are affiliate programs suited for?

Affiliate programs are well-suited to most types of businesses. In particular, industries like fashion, beauty, technology, food, and lifestyle brands.

The key question to ask is this: does your industry have highly influential people who can organically share your products with their audience?

If so, you want to invite those people to be your business’s affiliates.

Affiliate programs vs referral programs?

Affiliate programs are when you pay the affiliate a commission based on referred sales to your store. Say, you pay them 20% of sales of all the customers they send to you.

Characteristically, you’ll have a small number of affiliates who reach a large audience.

Referral programs are more of a friend-to-friend exchange. You can offer a customer a discount off their next order if they tell a friend about your store.

This often looks like “Send a friend $10 off, and you’ll get $10 off your next order.” You typically wouldn’t pay a referrer a percentage commission in a referral program. (Would a referrer really be encouraged by a 10% commission on a $25 order?)

These are much more natural, small-scale interactions between regular people. Anyone can sign up for the referral program – they don’t need to be able to reach a large audience… they just send a message to their friends.

If you’re looking for a guide to setting up a Squarespace referral program, Peach’s has a different plugin for that.

How to set up an affiliate program on Squarespace?

To set up our affiliate program, we’ll use Peach’s – an easy way to set up an affiliate program sepcifically for Squarespace.

Follow our guide and you’ll have your affiliate program up and running in ten minutes, and you’ll be able to invite influential affiliates to help grow your store.

1. Visit the Peach’s affiliate programs page and sign up for an account
   
   
   
   
2. On the “Create Program” screen, enter the details for your campaign name, your website’s URL, and your Squarespace store URL.
   
   Everything should be straightforward, and you can set a default commission of no commission, a percentage amount, or a fixed amount per order. You’ll also be able to customize this on a per-affiliate basis later.
   
   
   
   
3. Follow the first three steps on the Peach’s dashboard to connect your program to your store.
   
   The setup guide on the site links you to the relevant parts of your Squarespace admin settings, and you can copy and paste values from there.
   
   
   
   
4. With the last two steps, you’ll verify that your affiliate program is connected to your store and that your affiliate’s referred orders are getting tracked correctly.
   
   
5. After you’ve finished those steps, all your checkboxes will turn green, and you can click the button to make your program live.
   
   
   
   You can tweak the dashboard styles (what your affiliates see) and templates (affiliate emails and notifications) for your program before you go live.
   
   
   
   
6. Click the button to make your affiliate program live. You’re done!