January 10, 2023
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AliExpress is a global ecommerce marketplace made up of small retailers, wholesalers, and suppliers. It offers an extensive product selection and enables consumers to buy directly from businesses and manufacturers in China. Its main product categories include fashion and accessories, mobile, consumer electronics, jewelry and watches, home and garden, appliances, toys, outdoor, beauty and health, automobiles and motorcycles, home improvement, and tools. AliExpress is based in China and owned by Alibaba, a global ecommerce company.
Although AliExpress positions itself as an online retailer, most sellers understand that most of their customers are resellers and drop shippers. For instance, thousands of online retailers combine Shopify, a top-rated online store app, with AliExpress to run dropshipping businesses. AliExpress competes with the likes of Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and other high-volume ecommerce companies.
Company Profile
- Founded by the Alibaba Group in 2010
- CEO: Daniel Zhang (Alibaba)
- Headquarters: Hangzhou, China
- Stock ticker: BABA (Alibaba Group Holding Ltd – ADR)
- Over 200,000 sellers, suppliers, and manufactures
- Over 100 million product listings
- Customers from 200+ countries and regions
- The site supports multiple languages, including English, Spanish, French, and German
AliExpress Affiliate Program
AliExpress has an affiliate program. Its in-house program is called AliExpress Portals. It also has offers on affiliate networks, including FlexOffers, CJ Affiliate, and Awin. Let’s review the benefits, drawbacks, commission rate, cookie duration, and program details. Here’s a snapshot.
- Cost per action (CPA): Cost per sale
- Commission rate: Up to 9%
- Commission type: Single payment, nonrecurring
- Cookie duration: Session-based
- Payout threshold: $16
- Payment options: PayPal and bank account (get free bank account details for USD, EUR, GBP, and other currencies)
- Affiliate software/network: In-house, FlexOffers, CJ Affiliate, and Awin
Program Benefits
The payout threshold is low. When you accumulate a minimum of $16, you can withdraw your commissions on or before the 20th of each month. However, there is a $15 processing fee per withdrawal.
Affiliates can create tracking IDs to monitor performance. For example, you could create a link with an ID for your website and one for your promotional activities on Facebook. You could build links/IDs for each to compare their stats and results if you have multiple sites.
Deep linking is available, and it’s how an affiliate creates a link to a specific page on the merchant’s site. Instead of using a standard homepage affiliate link, you can link to a product, page, or article related to your content to increase relevance and conversion rates. Many ecommerce merchants allow deep linking due to the number of products and sellers available. AliExpress affiliates can also link to search results, hot-selling products, events, daily deals, and more. Webmasters can use its API to obtain, filter, and display product information.
The AliExpress Affiliate SiteStripe allows you to create links from any AliExpress page. The Affiliate SiteStripe will appear at the top of every AliExpress product detail page (you must be logged in). It provides efficient access for building and sharing links on social media. Publishers get basic product info from SiteStripe, including estimated commission rates, promo codes, and product sales for the past 30 days.
Publishers can choose from a handful of ad banners. Furthermore, dynamic ads are available. Dynamic ads will automatically update to show relevant goods based on your website’s content and your visitor’s browsing behavior on AliExpress.
Alibaba and Alibaba Cloud also offer affiliate programs. Alibaba is a leading wholesale marketplace for purchasing goods in significant volumes. Alibaba Cloud provides cloud computing services to online businesses and Alibaba’s ecommerce ecosystem. Their offers are available on FlexOffers and Rakuten Advertising.
AliExpress is a trustworthy and highly visited website. It offers excellent value, worldwide delivery, payment options, buyer protection, and a 24/7 help center. Customers can browse through thousands of sellers and millions of products. Seller profiles feature how long they’ve been on the site and customer feedback ratings.
Program Drawbacks
An affiliate signup page outlines the program and how it works, but AliExpress misses the mark. It provides a few standard details, such as the commission rate. However, its help center and FAQs are only available inside the portal. Those resources should be easily accessible from the landing page. Secondly, the landing page is poorly designed, with multiple fonts, font sizes, and grammatical errors.
Standard commission rates are low and range from 0 to 9 percent. Hot products, special offers, bestsellers, and new arrivals can pay up to 90 percent. Affiliates may also receive new buyer conversion fees of up to $4 per user.
AliExpress has a session-based cookie duration. A session is the period of time wherein a user interacts with an app. Session-based tracking is the worst and most unfair of all tracking durations. You likely won’t get credit for future sales if a user doesn’t purchase an item after clicking your link. AliExpress used to offer an unsatisfactory three-day cookie, so lose-win outcomes are their focus. The industry standard for cookies is 30 days.
The program details are scattered and disorganized. One of the worst things about AliExpress Portals is that the help center isn’t as helpful as expected. Moreover, AliExpress affiliate managers don’t take a holistic approach to updates. Instead, they update pages, terms, and guidelines separately. For instance, the affiliate fee statement page was updated on March 17, 2019, the program rules in April 2019, and the service agreement on February 16, 2019. Other observations are as follows:
- The affiliate fee statement page has multiple effective dates, fonts, font sizes, and grammatical errors.
- On the top questions page, questions are answered incorrectly. For example, “How high is the commission rate?” “The Portals Affiliate Program offers a minimum 8% commission.” However, AliExpress pays nothing for purchases made from its Special product category.
- The latest news page doesn’t contain news per se but content that could be put elsewhere. Moving the deep linking instructions to the new user page would make sense. Secondly, the news featured on the dashboard doesn’t match the news found in the help center, but the feeds should mirror each other.
Reporting is underwhelming. AliExpress offers three types of reports, i.e., traffic, income, and live order tracking. The reports dashboard is oversimplified, and some category/data headings are confusing. For example, “PV” doesn’t represent clicks but the “Number of pages viewed on a website.” Next, affiliates can’t export their performance data, a standard function with many affiliate marketing software apps.
The affiliate portal is buggy. Each time I tried to log out, I was logged back in. I had to visit the main website to log out. Also, I was occasionally and automatically logged out after trying to return to the homepage.
There are a few commission/performance-related statements that can’t be verified, for instance:
- “We paid out over US $100,000 per month last year, with top sellers earning up to $20,000 every month.”
- “Our top publishers earn over $30,000 / month and continue to earn more month over month.”
- “Average 3.5% site conversion rate and $140 USD order amount.”
- “We pay you for every purchase that originates from your website, blog, or SNS page.” That statement is false because a “special category” product sale attracts a commission rate of zero.
Statements like those are equivalent to the suspicious statements and income reports that shady affiliates use to promote themselves. Secondly, do the top publishers earn “$20,000” or “$30,000” monthly? It can’t be both.
There isn’t a dedicated affiliate manager. Instead, random customer service representatives are responsible for addressing publisher inquiries. When a merchant has the staff to support publishers, it quickens processes and shows commitment.
Making Money
Can you make four figures a month as an AliExpress affiliate? While AliExpress is a top ecommerce company, it’s unlikely that you will make that amount or a significant income. Low commission rates and session-based cookies will constrain your earnings and conversions. While you can earn high commission rates, you’re likely to generate standard commissions of up to 9 percent. Although the payout threshold is fair, the $15 processing fee per withdrawal is another drawback.
A bigger problem surrounds the management of the program. It’s scattered and disorganized, leading me to question its efficiency. Additionally, the Portals affiliate marketing software is buggy, confusing, dated, and subpar compared to other marketing apps.
Where should AliExpress rank in your marketing activities? It should be a low priority. I don’t recommend joining the AliExpress affiliate program because there are much better ecommerce and retail programs available. If you do want to promote AliExpress, skip the in-house program, and participate through FlexOffers, CJ Affiliate, or Awin. You’ll earn slightly lower commission rates of 3 to 7 percent, but you’ll gain in program administration, tracking software, reporting, and more.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the AliExpress affiliate commission rate?
AliExpress pays affiliates up to 9 percent on standard transactions.
What is the AliExpress cookie length?
The cookie is session-based.
