How to Set Up an Affiliate Programme in the UK: A Step-by-Step Guide

This is the step almost everyone rushes past, and it's the reason so many affiliate programmes go live with a bit of a bang and then quietly do nothing by month four.

Before you pick a network or set a commission rate, decide what you want from the channel. Are you trying to hit a specific revenue number? Break into a new market? Bring your blended customer acquisition cost down? Build visibility through comparison and review sites rather than pure sales volume? The answer changes almost everything downstream, including which affiliates you should be chasing and how you structure commission.

For most straightforward product sales, a flat cost-per-sale commission is the easiest place to start. In UK ecommerce, that's typically somewhere between 5% and 15% of order value for physical products, more for subscriptions or digital products where the lifetime value can carry it. But don't just copy a number you've seen online. Work out what it actually costs you once you stack the affiliate commission on top of the network's own fee, plus whatever discount code affiliates will inevitably ask for, plus your return rate. A 10% commission is very different on a 55% margin product than on a 20% margin one once VAT and delivery are in the mix. It's worth doing that maths before you commit to a rate publicly, because affiliates notice if you try to cut it later.

Tiered commissions, where your best affiliates earn more once they hit certain volumes, are worth building in eventually. I wouldn't try to set them intelligently on day one though. Launch flat, watch who performs for three or four months, then build tiers around the affiliates who've earned them.

When we set up the programme for Durex, the brief wasn't just "get us sales." Reckitt needed to launch across the UK, France, Germany and Spain at the same time and get to revenue fast, so the commission structure and network choice had to work across four markets from day one rather than getting bolted on country by country. Getting that goal nailed down early shaped every other decision on the programme.

If you're building affiliate into a wider product launch rather than adding it to an existing store, it's worth a read of how we structure affiliate marketing as part of a product launch, the sequencing is different when the channel launches alongside the product rather than being added later.

I'll be straight with you here, network pricing changes constantly, and a lot of what gets published online is out of date or was never accurate. 

Confirm current terms directly before you sign anything. But based on running live programmes across all four major networks, here's how I'd describe each one.

Awin is where most UK brands should start. It's got the biggest and most diverse UK publisher base of any of the networks, largely thanks to its merger with ShareASale, and the entry cost is usually lower than the enterprise players. If your affiliate mix leans on UK content sites, cashback and voucher publishers, this is where you'll find the deepest pool of them.

CJ Affiliate has been around since 1998 and has a stable, well-established base, especially among bigger retailers with a US footprint. It's also usually the priciest to get into. Setup costs and negotiated overrides tend to run higher than Awin's, and everything's negotiated individually rather than published, so get a proper quote before you budget for it. I'd only point a client to CJ as their first network if they're planning to expand into North America alongside the UK launch.

Rakuten Advertising is genuinely worth a longer note here because something changed this year that most other guides haven't caught up with. Back in April 2026, Rakuten and impact.com announced a strategic alliance to modernise the affiliate and performance marketing ecosystem. Under that deal, impact.com becomes Rakuten's exclusive technology platform, with Rakuten migrating all of its existing customers onto impact.com's platform over time as a newly created "Titanium" partner tier. In plain terms, Rakuten is stepping back from running its own tracking tech and repositioning around managed service and its Rakuten Rewards cashback business. If you're weighing up Rakuten as a standalone platform for a new UK programme, know that you'll likely end up on impact.com's infrastructure anyway, and get the current migration timeline from your Rakuten contact before you commit to anything.

Impact has the strongest tracking of the four and the best support for managing more than just affiliates in one place: influencers, referral partners, B2B deals, all under one roof. I'd steer a brand toward Impact once they're managing a large, varied set of partners, because the reporting depth earns its cost at that scale. For a first, smaller programme, the platform fee can outweigh what you get from it, so it's often better to outgrow a lighter network first and move over later.

My honest rule of thumb: launching your first UK programme, start with Awin. Expanding across territories or need to track different partnership types properly, Impact or CJ earn their keep. And you're not locked into one network for life either, plenty of brands we work with run on two networks at once to widen their publisher reach, which is much easier to get right with someone who's already negotiated those terms before.

Getting a network listing live doesn't recruit anyone for you. You still have to go and find the right affiliates, and the mix depends entirely on what you're selling.

Start by mapping out the affiliate types that make sense for your category. Cashback and voucher sites, Hotukdeals, Latest Deals, Vouchercodes and similar, drive volume fast and work particularly well for FMCG, health and household brands. On the Finish programme, deal affiliates including Hotukdeals, Latest Deals and 10ways were doing most of the heavy lifting from day one. Content and review sites build trust more slowly but convert well for anything people research before buying. Comparison sites matter if price shopping is part of the customer journey. And influencer-affiliates running their own tracked links have become a much bigger part of the mix, especially on TikTok and Instagram, where the line between influencer and affiliate is blurring anyway.

Once you know your target mix, go after it actively rather than waiting for applications to trickle in. Search the network directory for sites already promoting competitor or complementary products, reach out directly with a clear commercial pitch, and consider a time-limited recruitment bonus to get your first cohort live fast.

Not every affiliate who applies is worth approving, and this is a step people rush past when they're focused on hitting a headline number of affiliates. Before you approve anyone, check what kind of traffic they send, whether their promotional methods are compliant (brand-term PPC bidding is a common issue), whether they're already running voucher incentives that could undercut your pricing, and how they've performed for comparable brands where you can see that data.

I've written more about how we approached recruitment for a household brand in our Finish affiliate marketing case study, if you want the fuller picture.

This is the unglamorous bit, but get it wrong and you'll spend your first few months fighting commission disputes instead of growing the channel.

On tracking, set your cookie duration deliberately rather than accepting whatever the network defaults to. Longer windows suit content and review affiliates, shorter ones suit last-minute deal sites. Decide upfront how you'll handle the disputes that come up most often: someone clicks on mobile and buys on desktop, an affiliate-exclusive code gets applied after a different affiliate's click, or an order gets refunded after commission's already been paid. Write these rules into your programme terms rather than working them out affiliate by affiliate once a dispute's already landed on your desk. And check your tracking parameters don't clash with your own GA4 UTM setup, otherwise affiliate sales start showing up as organic or paid in your own reporting and nobody trusts the numbers.

On the creative side, build a clean product feed (most deal and comparison sites pull straight from this rather than scraping your site), a basic creative pack in the standard banner sizes, and a short brand guidelines sheet. If you're selling into more than one market, localise pricing and currency in the feed itself rather than leaving affiliates to convert it.

On compliance, this is worth taking seriously rather than treating as small print. Affiliate content in the UK falls under the CAP Code, and the ASA is clear thatany content referring to a product with an affiliate link or code attached counts as advertising, whether or not the brand had any say in what the affiliate wrote or posted. The ASA has said the content needs to be obviously identifiable as advertising, and where it isn't clear from the format, a plain "Ad" label is the safe route, not vaguer terms like "affiliate" or "collab," both of which it's previously ruled aren't well understood by consumers. And brands are treated as at least jointly responsible for what an affiliate publishes, even with zero editorial control over the content. Build clear disclosure requirements into your programme terms for every publisher, not just influencers, and spot-check content once affiliates are live rather than assuming they'll stay compliant once approved. I'd treat this as general guidance rather than legal advice, check current ASA and CAP guidance directly, or get proper legal advice, before you finalise your terms.

This is the step that decides whether a programme keeps growing or quietly dies, and it's the one most in-house teams underestimate before they get started.

I try to keep a rough rhythm across the week: check the previous week's sales and flag anything odd early on, spend proper time on recruitment and outreach rather than letting it slip, look ahead at seasonal dates and promotional opportunities, check compliance on what affiliates are publishing, then report back and agree what happens next. Miss that rhythm for a few weeks running and the programme drifts, I've seen it happen more times than I'd like.

Look hard at which affiliates are driving genuinely incremental sales versus which ones are mostly just capturing commission on sales that would have happened anyway. This is a real issue with some voucher code affiliates specifically. Compare new-versus-returning customer rates by affiliate, check whether their clicks tend to land right before checkout (a decent sign they're intercepting rather than influencing), and judge coupon-led publishers against a different benchmark than editorial ones rather than lumping them together.

Fraud and compliance need constant attention too. Coupon misuse, unauthorised brand bidding and cookie stuffing all quietly eat into margin if nobody's watching for them.

That discipline is exactly what took the Durex programme to over 2,000 active affiliates, 3.5 million website sessions and 300% year-on-year growth in the channel. It wasn't the network signup that did that, it was the week-in, week-out work after launch. The full detail, including the multi-territory launch, is in our Durex affiliate marketing case study.

Can you run a programme in-house? Genuinely, yes. Plenty of brands do it well. It just takes more ongoing time than most people expect once the launch buzz wears off.

Negotiating terms with new affiliates, reconciling commission invoices, chasing creative approvals, watching for fraud, and building the relationships that get you priority placement on the sites that move volume, that's close to a full-time job once you're a few months in. Most in-house teams have the bandwidth for the first six to eight weeks of a launch, then something else takes priority and the programme quietly stalls.

From what I've seen, brands usually bring in specialist support at one of three points: the programme's flatlined and nobody has time to work out why, they're launching across several territories at once (like Durex did across the UK, France, Germany and Spain), or they simply don't have existing affiliate relationships to speed up recruitment. If none of that sounds like you yet, running it in-house is probably the right call for now, and I'd rather tell you that than sell you something you don't need.

If you do bring in an agency, what you're actually paying for day to day is outreach and negotiation, weekly reporting, fraud monitoring, promotional planning around key retail dates, and commission optimisation as the programme matures. It's the same work I've just described in Step 5, done by people who've already built the affiliate relationships and know what moves revenue in your category specifically.

Already have a programme that isn't performing the way it should? Get a free affiliate audit and I'll tell you honestly what's working, what's leaking budget, and where the quick wins are.

Most guides quote you a commission percentage and leave it there, which understates the real cost. When I budget a programme for a client, I'm factoring in network setup or platform fees (which vary a lot and are usually negotiable), any ongoing override the network takes on top of commission, the publisher commission itself, incentive budget for launch bonuses or seasonal pushes, the cost of building and maintaining creative and feed, developer time to get tracking set up and tested properly, and either in-house staff time or agency fees for ongoing management.

Roughly: total programme cost = commission + network fees or overrides + management cost + incentive budget. Run that against your gross margin and average order value before you settle on a headline commission rate, not after you've already announced it to affiliates.

Mark Kelly has spent years running affiliate programmes for UK and international brands, from household FMCG names to D2C launches, and has advised on network selection, commission strategy, and affiliate recruitment across the UK, France, Germany, and Spain. Got a question about your own affiliate programme? Get in touch. 

Ques- How much does it cost to set up an affiliate programme in the UK? 

It depends on the network and is usually negotiated rather than published, so treat any figure you see online as a starting point. Budget for network setup or platform fees, publisher commission (typically 5% to 15% of order value for physical products), tracking setup, and either in-house time or agency fees.

Ques- Which affiliate network is best for UK brands? 

Awin usually has the strongest UK publisher base and the lowest entry cost, so it's where I'd point most brands launching their first programme. CJ suits brands expanding into North America. Impact suits brands managing a large or varied partner base. Rakuten and impact.com announced a 2026 alliance that changes how their platform and managed-service capabilities are combined. Confirm the current operating model directly with Rakuten before treating it as a standalone platform option. 

Ques- How long does it take to launch an affiliate programme? 

A single-market UK programme can usually go live in four to six weeks, covering network onboarding, tracking setup, creative and initial recruitment. Multi-territory launches, like Durex across four European markets, take longer because of localisation and separate network approvals in each country.

Ques- What commission rate should I offer affiliates? 

Start with a flat rate you've actually modelled against your margin, typically 5% to 15% for physical products and higher for subscriptions or digital products, once you've accounted for network fees, returns and any affiliate-exclusive discounts. Bring in tiered rates for top performers once you've got three or four months of real data.

Ques- What's the difference between an affiliate programme and an affiliate network? 

Your affiliate programme is your own scheme, your commission structure, your terms, the affiliates you recruit. The network (Awin, CJ, Impact, Rakuten) is the platform that provides tracking, publisher access and payments for that programme to run on.

Ques- Do I need an agency to run an affiliate programme? 

No, but most in-house teams find the ongoing management takes more time than they expect once the initial launch phase is over. Plenty of brands run things in-house for the first few months and bring in specialist support once growth plateaus or the workload outgrows the time they've got for it.

Setting up your affiliate programme, or trying to fix one that's underperforming? Talk to our affiliate marketing team about a free audit.