Affiliate networks, explained without the sales pitch

Almost every guide to affiliate networks is written by a network. We don’t own one. We run programmes across most of them for brands like Hornby, TBCo and Much Better Adventures, so here’s the honest version of how they work, what they cost and which one is likely to fit you.

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networks and platforms compared side by side, with no ranking for sale

2026

market shifts covered Rakuten, Awin, Adtraction and PartnerStack all moved this year

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working days for a straight answer once you send the form below

“No deck, no demo.” Just what it’ll cost and what we’d do in the first 90 days.

01 What an affiliate network actually is?

An affiliate network sits in the middle of your brand and the websites that send you sales. It handles the plumbing. Tracking links, cookies, attribution, commission rules, publisher contracts, invoicing and payments. When a journalist at the Independent puts your product in a Christmas gift guide and the link sends someone to your site who then buys, the network is what tells you that happened and pays the publisher their cut.

That’s the whole job. It is a marketplace and a billing system. It is not a growth strategy and it is worth being clear on that before you sign anything, because the difference between brands who do well in affiliate and brands who don’t is almost never the network they picked.

There is also a wording problem that trips people up. Some of these companies are networks, meaning they come with a directory of publishers already signed up. Some are platforms, meaning they give you the technology and you bring the partners yourself. Impact and Partnerize started as platforms. Awin and CJ started as networks. Most of them now do a bit of both, which is why the marketing on their websites all sounds the same. The practical question is whether you are buying access to publishers or just buying tracking.

02 What changed in 2026?

The landscape moved more in the first half of this year than it has in the last five, so if you’re working off a guide written in 2024 you’re working off the wrong map.

End of April

Rakuten × impact.com alliance

Rakuten and impact.com announced a strategic alliance. It isn’t an acquisition. In practice Rakuten is moving its platform merchants over to impact.com’s technology and focusing on what it does well: managed service and its Rakuten Rewards cashback business. That brings roughly two thousand advertiser programmes into the impact.com marketplace. If you’re on Rakuten’s platform today, ask your account manager about migration timing before you commit to anything long term.

This year

Awin fully absorbs ShareASale

Awin finished bringing ShareASale programmes fully under the Awin roof this year, nearly a decade after buying it. If you were running a US-facing programme on ShareASale, that’s now Awin.

2026

Adtraction buys Affiliate Future

Adtraction bought Affiliate Future, which gives the Nordic network a proper UK footprint and a ready-made base of UK advertisers and publishers.

2026 · B2B SaaS

AppDirect acquires PartnerStack

And in the B2B SaaS corner, AppDirect acquired PartnerStack part of the same consolidation pattern playing out across the wider market.

The pattern is consolidation. Fewer, bigger platforms with the networks layering managed service on top. For brands that mostly means two things. Publisher overlap between networks is going up, so being on three networks buys you less genuine reach than it used to. And service quality is becoming the thing you’re actually choosing between, not technology.

03 The main affiliate networks for UK brands

Nobody is paying us to be on this list and there’s no number one. The right answer depends on your size, your sector and how much resource you have internally.

Network

Best suited to

Where it's strong

Worth knowing

Awin

Most UK ecommerce brands, from starter to enterprise.

Biggest and broadest UK publisher base. Tiered plans so you can start small. Good reach across retail, travel and finance.

You’re one of thousands of programmes in the directory. Publishers won’t find you on their own. The interface feels its age.

impact.com

Brands running affiliate, influencer and partnerships together.

Strong automation, contracting and attribution. Much bigger marketplace after the Rakuten alliance.

Closer to a toolset than a network. You need someone driving it or it sits there.

CJ Affiliate

Larger brands with budget and a dedicated affiliate person.

Long-established, reliable tracking, deep publisher relationships, strong in the US.

Setup fees and minimums put it out of reach for smaller programmes.

Rakuten Advertising

Brands who want managed service and cashback reach.

Premium publisher relationships and the Rakuten Rewards audience.

Platform merchants are moving to impact.com. Check where that leaves you before signing.

Partnerize

Enterprise programmes with complex commercial rules.

Flexible commissioning, strong payments infrastructure, good for travel and multi-market retail.

Built for scale. Overkill if you’re doing under a few hundred orders a month.

Webgains

Mid-market UK and European brands.tarter to enterprise.

UK and European publisher base with a more hands-on account team than the giants.

Smaller publisher pool than Awin, so sector fit matters more.

Tradedoubler

Brands expanding across Europe.

Deep roots in mainland Europe, particularly the Nordics and Southern Europe.

Less depth in the UK specifically.

Adtraction

UK and Nordic brands, mid-market.

Growing UK presence following the Affiliate Future acquisition, straightforward commercials.

Newer as a UK proposition, so ask for sector-relevant references.

Refersion, UpPromote, Social Snowball

Shopify brands running creator and ambassador programmes.

Cheap, quick to install, easy to run in-house.

No publisher base at all. You recruit every partner yourself.

Levanta

Brands selling through Amazon.

Connects creators and publishers to Amazon listings, which the traditional networks can’t do.

Only useful if Amazon is a meaningful channel for you.

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One more layer

Publisher-side tools like Skimlinks and Sovrn sit on top of the networks and automatically turn ordinary product mentions into tracked affiliate links. Most large publishers use something like this. It means a lot of the gift guide and buying guide coverage you want is monetised through a layer you never contract with directly. Getting into those guides is a media relations job, not a network setting.

04 What it actually costs?

Published pricing in this industry is close to meaningless because almost everything above the entry tier is negotiated. Here’s the shape of it so you can read a proposal properly.

01 Setup fee

Anywhere from nothing on self-serve plans to several thousand pounds on a full managed enterprise contract. Frequently negotiable, especially if you commit to twelve months.

02 Monthly platform fee

Self-serve entry plans start in the low tens of pounds a month. Managed tiers run into hundreds or thousands depending on volume and level of support.

03 The override

This is the one people miss. On top of the commission you pay publishers, the network takes a cut. Depending on the network and plan that’s either a percentage of the transaction value, commonly somewhere between two and three and a half per cent, or a percentage of the commission you pay out, commonly twenty to thirty per cent. On a programme paying out ten thousand pounds a month in commission, budget a meaningful four-figure sum on top for the network.

04 Minimum monthly fee

Most networks have one. It’s the thing that makes a quiet programme expensive per sale, so ask early.

05 Management

Whether that’s an internal hire, the network’s own managed service, or an agency, it’s a separate cost line. A programme with nobody driving it will still cost you the platform fee every month.

So when you’re comparing, the number that matters is total cost per incremental sale, not the headline monthly fee. A cheap plan on a network where nobody knows you exist is not cheap.

05 How to choose?

Four questions get you most of the way there.

Where are your customers?

UK-only retail, Awin is the default for good reason and the burden of proof is on anything else. Multi-market Europe, look hard at Tradedoubler and Adtraction. Heavy US exposure, CJ and impact.com. Regulated finance, check FCA accreditation before anything else.

What's your order volume?

Under a few hundred orders a month, minimum fees will eat you alive on an enterprise contract. Start self-serve and upgrade when the numbers justify it. Nobody will tell you this on a sales call.

What kind of partners do you actually want?

If the answer is cashback and voucher sites, most networks will do. If it’s editorial, gift guides, buying guides and comparison content, the network barely matters. Those publishers are on all of them. What matters is whether anyone is pitching you into that coverage.

Who's going to run it?

Be honest. If the answer is nobody, fix that before you pick a network, because the network won’t do it for you.

06 The bit the networks won't tell you

Joining a network gets you a shop window. It does not get you customers.

Here’s what usually happens. A brand signs up, the programme goes live, and within a few weeks a handful of cashback and voucher sites have joined automatically because they join everything. Sales start appearing in the dashboard. It looks like it’s working. Then somebody runs the numbers and realises most of those sales were people who were already going to buy, who paused at checkout to search for a code.

That’s not a scandal, and cashback has a real role in a mature programme. But it isn’t growth, and it’s why so many brands conclude affiliate doesn’t work for them.

The growth comes from editorial. The gift guides, the best-of roundups, the buying guides that people actually read before they decide. Those placements bring new customers who didn’t know you existed, they carry the credibility of the publication, and they build links that help you everywhere else. They also don’t happen by themselves. No publisher is browsing the Awin directory looking for you. Someone has to know which writer covers your category, what they’re working on this month, and how to give them something worth including.

That’s the job we do. We call it affiliate PR because it sits in the gap between the PR agency who can get you coverage but can’t tie it to revenue, and the affiliate manager who can recruit partners but has never pitched a journalist. Same network, same tracking, completely different result.

07 Not sure which network fits? Ask us.

Send us a few details and we’ll come back within two working days with a straight answer. Which network we’d put you on and why, roughly what it will cost including the fees people forget, and the first three things we’d do to get the programme earning. If the honest answer is that you don’t need an agency yet, we’ll tell you that too.

08 Frequently asked

What's the difference between an affiliate network and an affiliate platform?

A network comes with publishers already signed up, so you’re buying access as well as technology. A platform gives you the tracking, contracting and payments and expects you to bring your own partners. Most of the big names now sell both, so ask the specific question on the call: how many publishers in my category are active on here right now?

How much does an affiliate network cost in the UK?

Three things to add up. A setup fee, which ranges from nothing to several thousand pounds. A monthly platform fee, from low tens of pounds on self-serve to thousands on managed enterprise. And an override, which is the network’s cut on top of whatever you pay publishers, typically two to three and a half per cent of transaction value or twenty to thirty per cent of commission paid. Most networks also have a monthly minimum. Management is a separate cost whichever way you do it.

Do I need an agency as well as a network?

Not necessarily, but you do need somebody whose job it is to run the programme. Recruiting publishers, negotiating placements, setting commission tiers, checking for fraud and pitching editorial coverage all take time. A network won’t do that for you unless you’re paying for a managed tier, and even then it’s rarely proactive on the editorial side.

Can I run an affiliate programme without a network?

Yes. Shopify apps like Refersion and UpPromote will track and pay partners for a fraction of the cost. The catch is that you get no publisher base, so every partner has to be recruited by you. That’s workable for creator and ambassador programmes. It’s a lot harder if you want to be in the Telegraph’s gift guide.

Which affiliate network is best for a small brand?

Usually an entry-level self-serve plan on Awin, because the UK publisher base is the broadest and you avoid the minimums and setup fees that come with enterprise contracts. Spend the money you save on getting the programme in front of publishers rather than on a bigger platform tier.

How long before an affiliate programme makes money?

Cashback and voucher sales appear almost immediately, but they’re rarely incremental. Editorial coverage takes longer because it runs on publishing calendars. Gift guide pitching for Christmas happens in August and September. Realistically you want to give a programme two full quarters before you judge it, and you want to be judging new customer revenue rather than total tracked sales.

What's happening with Rakuten and impact.com?

They announced a strategic alliance in April 2026. It isn’t a takeover. Rakuten is moving its platform merchants across to impact.com’s technology and concentrating on managed services and its Rakuten Rewards cashback platform. If you’re currently a Rakuten platform advertiser, ask about migration timing, whether historical data carries across, and what happens to your existing publisher links.

09 One conversation is usually enough

Most brands know within twenty minutes whether their affiliate setup is the problem or whether it’s what’s being done with it. Book a call, or send the form above and we’ll write back.

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