Most advertising asks you to pay first and hope for sales later. Every click on a search ad or a paid social post costs money, whether or not the visitor buys. Affiliate marketing works the other way round. Bloggers, review sites, community owners and newsletter writers recommend your products to their own audience, and you pay a commission only when a sale or qualified lead comes through. At Digital Marketing Singapore, we build and run that programme for you: the tracking, the commission design, the partner recruitment and the monthly reporting, so the channel grows without eating into your margin.
An affiliate is any person or business that promotes your products through a tracked link. A parenting blogger writing a gift guide, a review site comparing five brands, a cashback platform and a newsletter owner with a loyal readership are all affiliates. When a reader clicks the link and buys within an agreed window, the affiliate earns a commission. If nobody buys, you pay nothing for the placement.
That is the key difference from the other performance channels we run. Google Ads and social media ads charge for attention and then work to turn it into sales. Influencer marketing usually pays a fee for a post, whatever it sells. Affiliate marketing ties the cost directly to the result. It also reaches people at a useful moment: when they are reading reviews, comparing options and deciding what to buy.
Affiliate marketing works for products and for services. An online store pays a percentage of each order. A business that sells through enquiries, such as a tuition centre, an insurance broker or a software company, can pay a fixed amount for each qualified lead. We set up whichever model fits how your business makes money.
We manage the whole programme, so you do not need an in-house person who understands partners, tracking and payouts. Here is what that covers.
Everything depends on tracking. We test every affiliate link on phones and computers, in different browsers, and with a gap of several days between the click and the purchase. We set the cookie window, make sure sales are credited when a shopper returns on another device, and check your orders against the affiliate records. When we audited the programme in our kids products case study, about one in five sales was not being credited to the partner who earned it. Good partners leave quickly when that happens, so this is where we start.
A flat commission on everything rarely works. We set rates by product category and by volume, so low-margin items stay profitable while strong partners earn more as they grow. We write programme terms in plain English that cover brand bidding, coupon use, how long a click stays valid and when a commission is reversed for a return. Clear terms protect your margin and give partners confidence in the programme.
We build a list of partners that suit your brand: bloggers, communities, review sites, cashback and coupon platforms, newsletters and comparison sites. We approach them personally rather than sending a generic invitation. We prefer partners whose audience trusts them, because a small blog with loyal readers often sells more than a large site with passing traffic.
Each partner receives a welcome pack with product facts, approved images, a seasonal calendar and a private dashboard. Where it helps, we build comparison or gift-guide pages on your own site for partners to link to, so their readers land on a page that answers their questions. Our content team can write the supporting copy, and our web design team can adjust your store so that it tracks and converts properly.
Every programme attracts a few partners who bend the rules. We review orders weekly for self-referrals, unusual coupon use and high refund rates. We require partners to disclose affiliate links clearly, because Singapore’s advertising code, the Singapore Code of Advertising Practice, expects commercial relationships to be disclosed and endorsements to be honest. We also check that product claims are accurate under the Consumer Protection (Fair Trading) Act and that any customer data is handled in line with the PDPA. Partners who break the terms are warned and then removed.
Each month you receive a clear report with orders, revenue, cost per order and your top partners, plus a short note on what we changed and why. We adjust commission tiers, retire partners that do not perform and put more effort behind the ones that do. You can compare the cost per order with your other channels and decide how much to invest.
Singapore shoppers are online, comparison-minded and quick to read reviews before they buy. They check blogs, forums and community groups, then compare prices across a handful of stores. Because the market is compact, a recommendation from a trusted local voice carries real weight, and word spreads fast through parent groups, hobby communities and workplace chats.
Brands here are putting more money into the channel. According to impact.com’s 2025 Singapore snapshot, 75% of Singapore brands are increasing affiliate spend because costs in other marketing channels are rising, and 80% plan to grow their affiliate budgets further in 2026. The same report found that nearly half of Singapore brands earn 21% to 30% of their total revenue from affiliate marketing. These are survey results from a platform vendor, so treat them as a sign of direction, not a promise for your business. They do show that affiliate marketing is no longer a side experiment for the brands you compete with.
An affiliate programme gives you a second way to reach customers where you pay on results. It also builds a library of third-party content about your brand that keeps working long after a campaign ends, including pages that can appear in Google results for the comparison searches your own site may not win.
It is not right for every business. Affiliate marketing works best when your margins can support a commission, when your product is something people talk about or compare, and when your site tracks orders properly. We check these points first, and we will say so if another channel such as Google Shopping or lead generation is a better place to start.
There are three common ways to pay partners, and we choose based on how your business earns money.
The partner earns a percentage of the order value, or a fixed amount per order. This is the usual model for online stores.
The partner earns a fixed amount for each qualified enquiry or sign-up. It suits services, education, insurance and software, where a lead has a known value. We agree what counts as qualified, so you are not paying for leads you cannot use.
The partner earns a share of what the customer spends over a set period. It suits subscriptions and repeat purchases, and it rewards partners who bring customers that stay.
You can mix these. A store might pay a percentage on orders, a bonus when a partner passes a monthly target and a higher rate on new customers than on returning ones.
You can run a programme through a large affiliate network, through a tracking tool you control, or with an agency managing it for you. A network gives you access to many publishers quickly, but fees apply and the partners are often coupon and cashback sites. A tool you control gives you cleaner data and more control over who promotes you, but someone has to recruit, support and pay the partners. Most Singapore SMEs do not have a person with the time and know-how to do that well.
That is the gap we fill. We pick the set-up that suits your size, run it day to day and report on it. If a network makes sense for part of your programme, we use one. If a direct programme works better, we build that. You keep ownership of your partner relationships and your data.
We treat affiliate marketing as part of your wider marketing, not a separate experiment. The same team that runs your SEO, paid campaigns and email marketing can run your affiliate programme, so a partner’s traffic is followed up with remarketing and email instead of being lost.
We are Singapore specialists. We know the local blogs, communities and comparison sites, the way shoppers here behave, and the advertising guidelines that apply. We spend our time recruiting and supporting a small number of good partners, because quality beats the length of the list.
We also report plainly. Every figure ties back to your own orders, and we show cost per order against your other channels so you can judge for yourself. You can see how this works in practice in our case studies, including the fashion ecommerce Google Shopping case study that shows how we measure online store performance.
1
We test your tracking, fix what is broken, set the cookie window and write the programme terms.
2
We design your commission tiers around your margins and build a shortlist of partners that fit your brand.
3
We approach partners personally, send welcome packs and give them access to their dashboards. The first new partners begin earning.
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We build comparison pages, supply content, run weekly fraud checks and review commission tiers.
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You get a monthly report, and we put more effort behind the partners and categories that perform best.
Fixing tracking often shows an effect within the first month, as sales that were never credited start counting and existing partners regain confidence. New partners usually need two to three months to publish and begin earning, so plan for five to six months before judging the channel.
In one six-month programme for a Singapore kids products store, monthly affiliate revenue grew from S$1,400 to S$17,600, active affiliates grew from 6 to 41, and cost per affiliate order fell from S$11.80 to S$10.20. The results depend on your margins, your product and the partners available, so we agree what to measure at the start. Read the full case study.
If you want a sales channel where the cost rises only when your sales do, we can help you build one. Tell us about your business, your margins and your best-selling products. We will tell you honestly whether affiliate marketing fits and what a realistic six-month plan looks like. Book a free consultation.