Mobile and Software Application Onboarding Guide for Commerce

Overview

Unlike other affiliate platforms, Sovrn Commerce requires all applications/software to implement or install our affiliate links and generate clicks before reviewing an application/software for approval. If approved, you'll be able to affiliate with tens of thousands of merchants without the need to apply to these merchants individually. To help get you through our review process, we've developed this onboarding guide, which will give you instructions, tips, warnings, and extra resources to give your account the best possible chance at approval. 

This onboarding guide is best suited for publishers who will be using Commerce for their mobile applications or downloadable software, including but not limited to browser extensions, toolbars, Apple/Android applications, and desktop applications. This guide will walk through the following steps (and you can skip to a specific step by clicking an icon below)

Registration  ➡️  Installation  ➡️  Generate Clicks  ➡️  Get Approved  ➡️  Next Steps

 
In addition to signing up on the platform, you will also need to fill out additional forms to make sure that your software is compliant with our merchant regulations.

Registration

Sign up for a free account here. You can use an email and password, or choose to use your Google account to sign up. 

Find out more about terms and conditions/policies here and upon account creation.

You'll be asked to confirm your email address. 

Then, you'll be prompted to flow through the following steps: 

Welcome

Once you sign up, and confirm your email, you'll start on the Welcome tab in the Platform. From here, you can click Get started under Affiliate marketing or click Commerce on the left-side navigation bar. This'll take you to the Getting Started page for Commerce. 

You'll be able to return to the Welcome tab anytime to learn more and get started with other products. 

Getting Started

From here, click Get started with Commerce. This'll walk you through a few steps you'll need to complete to start monetizing, also described below: 

You'll be prompted to submit your site for approval. You will have the option come back later and submit more sites using the Settings page, which will appear soon. 

You'll also need to read and accept terms and conditions at this point. 

Submit Site for Approval

You'll be prompted to submit your site for approval. You will have the option come back later and submit more sites using the Settings page, which will appear soon. 

You'll also need to read and accept terms and conditions at this point. 

Disclosure Forms

If you have a software or mobile app, we will need some extra information in order to review your account for approval. Our merchants need to know as much information about you as possible in order to make sure that you align with their promotional strategies. Please be aware that many of our partnered networks require all mobile applications to be disclosed to them prior to distribution.

We'll need to get information from you like the following:

• How your application or software runs on content

• What your application or software collects on user information

• How you plan on using Sovrn Commerce 

If possible, we would love to see the following information as well:

• White paper or media kit from your application 

• Screenshots or recordings of the software in use

You can submit the white paper or media kit to cq@sovrn.com after completing the application.

Below you will find the application for disclosures for your respective software:

• Mobile Application Disclosure

• Downloadable Software Disclosure

Please note that we will need separate forms for each software/application that you submit. You can read more about why we need this here.

Installation

You're making great progress! Next, you'll need to add Sovrn's affiliate links to your application/software. Our API suite offers a host of options to customize your Sovrn Commerce experience. You can find the full Sovrn Commerce API documentation here.

To implement Commerce and create links through the API, we recommend using the  "Building Monetized URLs" API, or the "Link Monetization" API. 

The Building Monetized URLs API will give you an overview of how to build an affiliate link by adding in the Sovrn redirect information. Think of this as stitching together the different pieces of an affiliate link. This is best used for extremely custom integrations, where you may want to add your own Tracking ID. This API will not perform an affiliation check, and will wrap any link with a Sovrn affiliate redirect, regardless of if Sovrn currently has an active relationship with this merchant.

The Link Monetization API will also return an affiliate link, simply by submitting an outgoing URL and your site's API key (which you can find on the Settings page by clicking the "Key" icon next to your site or by using the "Account Info" API). With this API, you can see whether a URL is affiliatable and the current estimated EEPC for this link. 

Once you've created your Sovrn affiliate link through either of these methods, you can add these links to your site! 

Generate Clicks

Once you've implemented Sovrn Commerce through our APIs, we will need to see a few clicks routing through these links. This allows us to check on your installation and ensure that we are receiving traffic successfully. We recommend sending a few test clicks through these links, or having your users click on the links that you created. 

Get Approved

You've gotten through our implementation process! Now that you've generated a click, your software has been added to our team's list to review. We'll review this software as quickly as we can, but it may take 5 business days before you receive an email with your approval status.

If you have not received an update with your application/software's approval status, and you are not seeing clicks in your Sovrn dashboard after 5 business days, please reach out to support@sovrn.com.

If our Network Quality team has further questions about your software or application integration, they may reach out to you for further questions.

Next Steps

Congratulations! You've successfully onboarded your first application onto Commerce. Here are some next steps to finish entering your account information, and to set you up for success moving forward. 

Affiliate with Merchants

If your software is approved for Sovrn Commerce, you can now affiliate with tens of thousands of our merchant partners without needing to request additional approval! You can search for any merchant that you would like to affiliate with in our "Approved Merchants" page to find their individual rate information, including average commission rates, conversions rates, average order values, and average earnings per click. Learn more about affiliating with merchants here: Approved Merchants in Commerce.

You can also download a full list of merchants that your site is approved for via the "Approved Merchant Report" under the "Report" button in your analytics dashboard.

Looking for more information on how to best affiliate with merchants? We've included more tips here: 5 Tips for Getting Started with Sovrn Commerce

Recommended APIs

Sovrn has a variety of other useful APIs that you may want to add to your custom integration! You may be interested in one of our Reporting, Product, or Merchant APIs:

• Transaction Reporting - For each revenue event, retrieve relevant data about the transaction, including click date, merchant information, commission ID, order value, and net revenue. You can also find CUID values here, if you included these via the Building Monetized URLs API.

• Product Metadata - Retrieve metadata about a product from a product URL, including brand, SKU, UPC, price, description, and image, if provided to us by each merchant. 

• Merchant Status - Retrieve your approval status for individual merchant programs (such as each approved program that we offer with Macy's), along with the merchant's estimated commission, industry, domains and accepted countries. 

• Merchant Metadata - Retrieve metadata about a merchant from a query, including merchant names, domains, logos, descriptions, and even products, when available. 

• Campaigns - Retrieve a list of your campaigns (or "sites") that you have submitted in your account. 

You can find full API documentation here.

Add additional sites to your account: Traffic Segmentation

Sovrn requires each unique location where you intend to add Sovrn affiliate links to be reviewed for approval individually. Not only does Traffic Segmentation help with reporting for your account, but it keeps your account in compliance with Sovrn and our Merchant and Network partners.

To learn about traffic segmentation, please see: Traffic Segmentation in Commerce. 
 

You can add additional sites, profiles, or softwares to your account here. 

For example, someone with multiple social media accounts and a website, a Settings page with correctly segmented traffic would have separate sites submitted for: 

• instagram.com/page1

• instagram.com/page2

• website.com

For more information on how to use the Settings tab, please see Site Settings in Commerce.   

Payment and Tax Information 

You'll want to finish setting up your account by adding payment and tax information. You can add your payment information here.

If you have multiple Apps in your Sovrn account, you will need to add payment information for each of your products. You can add payment information for a specific app by using the "Product" drop down menu. 

You can read more about Sovrn Commerce payment methods, thresholds, and schedules in this article: Payments in Commerce.

More Resources

Sovrn Blog

Find the Sovrn blog here. Successful affiliate marketing requires an active strategy, a good understanding of data, and, of course, high-quality content. Sovrn posts industry trends, recommended holiday promotions, and deep dives into our product offerings on the Sovrn Blog. Improving your understanding by learning more about these topics (to name a few) will help you in this area: 

• EPC

• How to write an excellent product review

• Secrets to Drive More Commerce Revenue (Webinar)

Knowledge Base

More information on how to use the Sovrn Commerce platform can be found in the Sovrn Knowledge base. You'll find information on everything from account setup, implementation, troubleshooting, analytics, and more. We recommend the checking out the following topics:

• Learn more about how to read the Commerce dashboard, understand the metrics, and some of the caveats you may run into, see: Analytics in Commerce.

• Find out about payment thresholds, cycles, methods, reconciliation, and more, see: Payments in Commerce. 

• Understand how to best utilize Commerce to affiliate with merchants, see: Approved Merchants in Commerce.

Support

As always, please feel free to reach out to publisher support with any questions, concerns, or feedback here. We're happy to help with any questions you have!