An online company especially the one that sells products online is dependent for a major percentage of its sales on affiliates. This emphasizes the importance of affiliates in making or breaking a company. Although an affiliate is somewhat similar to a dealer in traditional business, he stands to earn a lot more than one in margins and commissions. While this underlines the importance of associates in e-commerce, it also gives rise to the requirement of a platform where a merchant can find ready affiliates and affiliates can find ready products to sell.

Affiliate marketing has taken two different directions since the inception of the concept. One, the seller can appoint his or her own affiliates across the internet and the other; they just sell through other sites that promote affiliate marketing like Clickbank, Click2Sell.EU or Paydotcom. Although the first is a dream route of any online company, the process itself is tedious and time consuming, even backend administration could be time consuming and intricate. Today's online companies prefer the second route since

- They do not need to look for affiliates.
- They get a set network of affiliates selling for them eliminating the need for training or product introduction.
- They get an all-in-one interface that processes the affiliate information and payment information resulting in the need for low backend infrastructure.

Since the coming of these websites, affiliate marketing has been rendered much simpler and easy to administrate. While many of them work by preset rules and render great service to both merchants and affiliates, competition has given rise to many other options across the virtual world making the niche a fiercely competitive one. Let us look at each of these websites to know more:

ClickBank

The Clickbank Marketplace, as it is called is an all-in-one amazing program in itself that sells all by itself and generates revenue for both the seller and the affiliate. It is completely automated and runs all by itself automatically with an immediate response time. Being the pioneer of affiliate marketplaces, ClickBank has established itself with deep rooted foundations in the niche and carved out the rules of play.

Clickbank is also powered by a professional design and is a mature search engine too. With more than 50,000 products and businesses, the Clickbank Marketplace is supported by an automated database update algorithm and set cookies that feature a three month shelf life after the visitor leaves your website.

ClickBank also has various payment options but does not support Paypal, the result being that the withdrawal process is long drawn and could take over a month to receive the cheques. While the marketplace options are good and time tested, ClickBank has not kept up wit pace in facilitating the use for merchants and affiliates. This is evident from it non-support for physical products which is major drawback in today's competitive marketplace.

Paydotcom

Like ClickBank, paydotcom is also an affiliate portal and is Paypal based. Similar to ClickBank, promoting listed affiliate products through Paydotcom is very easy. With free joining for affiliates, Paydotcom support only Paypal.

Comparing to ClickBank, paydotcom has kept merchant accounts free while ClickBank charges a $49.95 activation fee. Moreover, Paydotcom allows the merchant to sell more than one product per merchant account unlike Clickbank that allows only one product per account, only if you have multiple products you need to pay an activation fee of $29.

Paydotcom also allows physical and digital products along with subscription based services to sell, while ClickBank only allows digital products. This enables merchants to do away with the requirement of owning a website in order to sell their products online.

All in all, paydotcom is a good option for those merchants who sell a limited number of products, since it supports only the Paypal payment gateway. This also limits the options of merchants and affiliates who reside in geographical areas that do not support Paypal.

Both ClickBank and Paydotcom are good affiliate platforms and have very strong basic features. While they have awesome following, they lack in advanced features like affiliate performance measurement, buyers behaviour and statistical tracking, download protection, easiness and flexibility. A lot of third party tools are available to take care of this shortcoming but then these are expected to be inbuilt especially when a customer is charged for the same.

Click2Sell.EU - http://www.click2sell.eu

As an even platform Click2Sell.EU offers the best of both worlds - ClickBank and Paydotcom. It is based on the pay-per-performance model and is suited to both affiliates and individual merchants - company owners. Like Paydotcom, Click2Sell.EU offers listing of all products - physical, digital and subscription based.

Clcik2Sell also has a plethora of payment options that include Paypal, Moneybookers, Credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Eurocard). The customers can pay through your Authorize.net, Worldpay or Google Checkout merchant accounts using their credit cards! Click2Sell.EU also supports various currencies like USD, EUR or GBP. All these payment options work at blazing speeds and payments are instant.

Built on the intuitive engine, Click2Sell.EU is much easier to navigate in comparison to ClickBank or Paydotcom. Moreover, unlike paydotcom and ClickBank, Click2Sell.EU offers the merchants a FREE account with an unlimited number of products to sell or promote with no hidden costs. In a stark difference from Clickbank that charges $49.95 activation fee for each account and paydotcom that charges $29 activation fee for multiple products accounts, Clcik2Sell has kept the joining fee at Zero, encouraging merchants to join and save precious money.

With state-of-the-art reporting systems and marketing tools, Click2Sell.EU offers the bets of both worlds to both merchants and affiliates. Covering the niche and taking the best from ClickBank and Paydotcom, Click2Sell.EU is all set to take the affiliate world by storm. Clisk2Sell overcomes the bottlenecks of both ClickBank by selling physical products and paydotcom by not limiting the payment processing options making it the emerging market leader in the affiliate marketing marketplaces.

Although Click2Sell.EU is new to the niche it has some great tracking and protection tools unlike the competition and comes free. Some of the awesome features that Click2Sell.EU packs are:
Refunds: Full control on all refunds. Customer refunds can be made at the click of a button from the member's area.
Advanced Payment system: Affiliate commissions are to be paid through the member's area making it easier to track the payments. Affiliates can rest easy. All affiliates receive money automatically to their Paypal or Moneybookers accounts. Every affiliate is able to know how much is already paid and how much money is yet to be paid.
No more dishonest merchants: Merchants who do not pay the affiliates are tracked at Click2Sell.EU and barred from the system. The result is that the merchants that do business at Click2Sell.EU marketplace are honest and fair. All affiliates are paid on time - within 3 weeks after the end of a month.
Track keywords: As an add-on to your SEO efforts, you can also track the keywords which result in views, visitors and sales. This analysis could help optimize your site for better search engine placement and sales. Moreover, you can easily track different websites that refer visitors to affiliate links or product pages and measure a quality of traffic - how much of visitors convert to buyers.
PPC Campaigns: You can also track your Pay-Per-Click campaigns with Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and FindWhat, thus making them more effective, cost wise by getting conversion ratios for each keyword.
While Click2Sell.EU is still new to the arena, it is already working on a major update which will bring in more changes and betterments to the present system. This is estimated to be effected in a few months time. However, this does not mine that minor updates will be on the back burner. Continued improvement is what drives a business and Click2Sell.EU is no exception.

With grandiose plans, Click2Sell.EU will take no time to surpass the benchmarks set by ClickBank and Paydotcom. Till such time that eCommerce exists, affiliates will continue to do business. And as per Darwin's theory, the fittest of these platforms will survive. With Click2Sell's philosophy making the marketplace top-of-the-line for both merchants and affiliates, it seems that Click2Sell.EU ( http://www.click2sell.eu ) is a great option for the future and a beginning of things to come.

Regimantas is a blogger writing about affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing networks, online business success at Affiliate Marketing Blog.