PartnerStack Review – After $500K in Sales & $100K in Commissions

There are two tools I’ve loved using in the last 4 years of my career so far – ClickUp, and PartnerStack. The primary reason is innovation and the speed at which these innovative ideas are applied to the live product.

I’ve been using PartnerStack as an affiliate for the last 3 years. I joined very early when it was called GrowSumo and was in its initial phases.

It’s one of those tools that has radically changed how SaaS businesses manage their partner programs.

Before PartnerStack, you couldn’t find an affiliate tool that looked beautiful and still provided exactly what you needed, both as an affiliate and a business owner looking to grow your revenue.

It makes it easy to find the right partners, track links, offer exclusive affiliate offers, onboard new affiliates, run incentive challenges, offer smooth partner payouts, handle the regulatory obligations, multi-tier management and overall help you build a mutually rewarding partnership between businesses and partners.

PartnerStack handles everything for you.

It manages the entire partner funnel, right from onboarding an affiliate to global payouts, which saves you time and hassle.

If you’ve ever used an affiliate marketplace like ShareASale, you’ll understand how difficult it is to find a partner relationship management tool that does pretty much everything for you without bugging you every day.

I recently crossed the $100,000 commission milestone on PartnerStack after selling about half a million worth of SaaS subscriptions.

So, I thought, why not write about my experience and thoughts in a review.

I crossed the 100k mark simultaneously on another affiliate platform. However, it looks like this:

Even in 2021!. It’s literally just a page with numbers and text.

Compare this to the PartnerStack dashboard, and you’ll realize why they’ve grown at such a fast pace.

Aesthetics are a make-or-break deal for me. I’ve always preferred a platform with a better User Experience (UX)/(User-Interface) UI. I believe so would you once you start using an easy-to-navigate and beautiful-looking affiliate dashboard. It makes it easier to manage your affiliates, get access to promotional resources, track your sales, and other data.

PartnerStack has an even better backend to reliably track affiliate earnings, and make sure there are no invalid purchases. Rewards & commission payments are on time and paid to the right affiliates (accurate tracking).

If you’re an SaaS business, you need to checkout PartnerStack if you don’t have an affiliate program in place. You’re missing out on a huge chunk of revenue from a steady customer stream.

Even if you do, you should take an exclusive free demo, my friends, over at ParterStack have offered to our readers. I’m pretty confident you’ll find it much more intuitive, robust, efficient, and overall a better partner management software compared to any other software out there.

Let’s take a dive into PartnerStack’s features.

Affiliate Dashboard – UI and UX

Most of the Affiliate Management software (AMS) and Partner Relationship Management software (PRMs) are clunky and often not easy to navigate.

And you know what’s funny?

If an AMS is robust, comes with a bunch of features, they aren’t easy to navigate around— plus they look like one-page static websites from the 2000s.

And if they are easy to navigate, have decent UX, they aren’t robust at all.

I’ll give you two examples:

• Impact and Ambassador.
• ShareASale and RewardFul.

Go check out the above pairs before moving on and you’ll get a better idea of what I’m talking about.

Robustness and good UX are rarely in equal proportion regarding an AMS.

However, PartnerStack is nearly perfect regarding both. It’s getting more features every quarter, the development is fast and the UX + UI is constantly improving.

This is good for both you and your affiliate.

You can track, manage, and connect with your affiliates efficiently. Your affiliates can track their sales, access promotional resources/important messages, communicate with you when needed, analyze their performance, and they will get paid without any delay or complexity.

Much Better Onboarding

By far, PartnerStack has the best onboarding among all the affiliate management software I’ve used so far. And I’ve used close to 90% AMs and PRMs out there.

You get a complete one-on-one call with the PartnerStack team where they guide you through everything.

From recruiting the right partners, setting up, tracking, adding promotional resources, customization according to your brand, deep-link generation, payout mode, to managing your entire reseller network.

Unlike other tools, you have someone always available to answer your questions, no matter how many you may have. 10 or 100, you’ll find the best onboarding experience with PartnerStack.

I can say the same for the management as well. Once your partner program is live, the ParterStack team does everything they can to help you run a successful campaign.

Your affiliates will get the best onboarding as well, right from the moment they join your affiliate program.

They work closely, with your business, and create solutions designed for you, which is something you don’t get with leading and more complicated tools like Impact.

Multi-Channel Partner Solutions

PartnerStack allows you to create multi-channel partnerships including:

• Affiliate
• Reseller
• Referral
• Ambassadors
• Influencers
• And more – as I said, they create specific solutions for you.

If you’re like most people, you won’t be able to differentiate between an affiliate program and a referral program. Or reseller and channel reseller.

But they’re all fundamentally different. Affiliate marketing isn’t referral marketing and being a reseller is a totally different domain.

Most tools don’t allow you to create multi-channel partnership programs in one place. You would need to spend extra money and hassle using different tools.

PartnerStack, on the other hand, provides a multitude of solutions in one platform based on understanding your business and needs first.

No Hassle Payout

I’ve been with tens of different affiliate programs where managing the payout was the biggest issue.

When you’re recruiting affiliates from all around the globe, you have to follow tons of regulations if you use proprietary affiliate software to track the sales, but pay your affiliates using PayPal, or Payoneer. Forget about wire transfers – too expensive.

When you handle payouts yourself. You need to make sure everyone’s getting paid on time.

Which isn’t as easy as it seems. If someone didn’t receive their payment, it’s on you. If they turn out to be a fraudulent entity, you’re liable. Then there is the tax information you need to collect.

Federal Trade Commission (FTC) compliance, ethical marketing requirements and more.

Thinking of paying your affiliates via PayPal mass payouts?

Here are a few points you need to be aware of:

• PayPal mass pay isn’t available in many popular countries.
• You and your payee will have to pay floating fees (which change frequently).
• It’s complex – you’d need to spend capital on developers, custom application solutions.
• You will still have to make sure you and your affiliates are abiding by tax regulations.

I’ve seen a lot of affiliate programs getting shut down and most of them were using a WordPress plugin combined with Paypal mass payouts, and didn’t use any assistance for recruiting quality affiliates.

So, how does Partnerstack handle the Payout?

Each month, PartnerStack will generate an invoice for commissions you owe to affiliates. This invoice is payable via credit card or ACH direct deposit.

Once you clear this invoice, Partnerstack informs the affiliates about their finds being available for withdrawal. Affiliates can choose to withdraw their commission via Paypal or Stripe.

That’s super smooth compared to platforms like Impact and ShareASale, where you have to constantly manage payouts and monitor the availability of funds in your account.

You can add your finance team to control the affiliate payout and give them full access to other financial sections as well.

One of the major highlights of the PartnerStack reward/payout system is Drip Rewards. Using Drip rewards, you can lock and release partner rewards after a certain number of days.

This feature is helpful if you offer a 30-day refund policy or 14-days trial period for your product or anything that doesn’t allow you to lock into that customer revenue for a number of days. Close to 99% of SaaS businesses offer a trial or money-back guarantee. The only exceptions are certain downloadable products and WordPress plugins.

Then there are Partner Challenges which basically are short-term performance-based bonuses you can offer your affiliates.

As I said, there are many features that come exclusively with the PartnerStack platform.

A Marketplace To Recruit Best Affiliates

One of the ways to control the quality of affiliates is by using the application process. When you enable the application process, affiliates will need to apply to join your affiliate programs by filling out an application form which your affiliate manager will review manually.

This way, you can either accept or reject an application and control the number and quality of affiliates for your business.

By listing your product on the PartnerStack marketplace, you get more exposure. More affiliates find your business and join your affiliate program resulting in more brand recognition.

You think it’s an automated marketing channel. It’s not.

Affiliates are tricky – they come in all shapes and sizes. Some are good affiliates; some are bad ones.

You need to make sure most of your affiliate partners belong to the good category. The ones who don’t spam, bid on your behalf, make false purchases, use false claims, offer an incentive to make a sale, and so on.

Using PartnerStack, you dramatically reduce the chances of recruiting affiliates that might hurt your brand.

That’s my take on PartnerStack. There are still many points I’d like to cover, however, it would be best if you took the free demo for yourself. Explain your business, goals, requirements and expectations to the PartnerStack team.

You’ll be able to go through everything in detail. The demo will explain how the platform works, how you can use it to scale your revenue – along with a smooth onboarding process.