The short version: There is no single “best” affiliate platform, only the right one for what you already have, meaning your traffic, your niche, and your patience for admin. For most beginners with a UK or US audience, ShareASale or Awin are the easiest doors in, Amazon Associates is the weakest earner per click but the fastest trust-builder, and CJ Affiliate and Impact only make sense once you have proof of traffic to show them.
What decides the right platform (it isn’t the commission rate)
Everyone writing about this topic starts with a table comparing commission percentages. That table is the least useful part of the decision, and I say that having run affiliate programmes for clients and having promoted other people’s products myself for over a decade.
What decides the right platform is three boring questions: who buys from you already, how long your readers take to purchase after clicking, and how much admin you can stomach. A 10% commission on a product nobody in your audience wants is worth precisely nothing. A 3% commission on something your readers were already about to buy is worth quite a lot. I cover this in the piece on whether affiliate marketing really pays, because the income numbers people quote almost never mention the platform they were earned on, which matters more than they admit.
The main platforms, and what they’re like to use
Amazon Associates
Still the default starting point for new affiliates, and there’s a reason: almost everyone trusts Amazon enough to buy, so conversion rates are high even from cold traffic. The catch is the commission structure Amazon cut back in 2020. You’re now looking at 1% on video games and electronics, up to around 10% on luxury beauty and a handful of niche categories, and a 24 hour cookie window that resets if the buyer adds something to their basket without checking out. Miss the checkout by a day and you earn nothing.
Awin
Awin is where I moved a UK travel blog client after Amazon Associates flatlined for them. Awin charges a refundable deposit (around £5 in the UK, held until your first payout) and gives you access to travel, finance and retail brands most beginners haven’t heard of, paying 5% to 20% depending on the merchant. The application process asks harder questions than Amazon does about your traffic sources, and Awin rejects a meaningful share of brand-new sites with no history, so don’t apply on day one of a blank blog.
ShareASale
Owned by Awin since 2017 but run as a separate platform with its own merchants, mostly US-based small and mid-size ecommerce brands. This is the easiest network to get approved on as a genuine beginner, sometimes within a day, and I usually point people here first for that reason alone, even though average commissions (10% to 20%) sit in the middle of the pack rather than at the top.
CJ Affiliate (Commission Junction)
This is the network for household names like Barclaycard, Lenovo and Booking.com, and it shows in the approval bar. CJ wants to see traffic numbers and a content history before it lets you near its bigger merchants, which makes it a poor first choice and a solid second or third one once you have three to six months of published content behind you.
Impact
Impact runs the affiliate programmes for Shopify, Airbnb, Canva and Uber, among others, and its dashboard is better built than most of the older networks, showing real-time click and conversion data without you needing to bolt on Google Analytics separately to see what’s working. Commission rates vary wildly by merchant, and approval standards are closer to CJ’s than to ShareASale’s.
ClickBank
Different animal entirely: ClickBank deals in digital products, courses, and info products, with commissions often quoted at 50% to 75%. Those numbers look brilliant next to Amazon’s 1% to 10%, but ClickBank also has some of the highest refund and chargeback rates in affiliate marketing, sometimes 20% to 30% on lower-quality products, which quietly claws back a chunk of what you think you’ve earned. I’d treat any commission figure from ClickBank as a headline number, not a take-home one.
The story that changed how I recommend platforms
A few years back I worked with a small UK travel blog, decent traffic, around 40,000 sessions a month, all sitting on Amazon Associates because that’s what every beginner guide told them to use. Travel commissions on Amazon in the UK sit at around 3%, and their monthly affiliate income was £340, which for that traffic level is low.
We moved the hotel and travel insurance links over to Awin, applied to five travel-specific merchants, got accepted by three, and rebuilt the same articles with those links instead. Same traffic, same articles, same audience. Within three months monthly affiliate income was £890. Nothing else changed except which network sat behind the link. That’s the whole argument for looking past Amazon once you have any traffic at all.
Step by step: how to pick
- List what your audience already buys. Pull this from your own sales if you have any, or from the comment sections and DMs if you don’t.
- Search each product or brand plus “affiliate program” and note which network runs it. Most brands will tell you outright on their footer page.
- Apply to two or three networks, not one. ShareASale for speed of approval, Awin or Impact for the merchants you want, and keep Amazon running underneath both as a backup for anything they don’t cover.
- Check the payment threshold before you commit content to it. Some networks hold your first payout until you hit £50 to £100 earned, which matters if you’re testing something new.
- Read the cookie duration on each merchant, not just the network average. A 24 hour cookie and a 90 day cookie are two completely different businesses wearing the same commission percentage.
- Run the same piece of content on two networks for 60 to 90 days where the product overlaps, and let the actual numbers decide, not the promised rate.
The bit most guides skip
Here’s the part that’s uncomfortable to say plainly: for most people reading a “which platform” article, the platform is not their problem. Their traffic is. I’ve watched people spend three weeks comparing Awin against Impact for a blog getting 200 visitors a month, when the honest fix was building an audience first. If you don’t yet have a list, start one, because choosing a newsletter platform and getting people onto it will do more for your affiliate income than swapping networks ever will. Platform choice moves your income by maybe 20% to 40% at the margins. Traffic and trust move it by ten times that. Nobody wants to hear this because “which platform” has a tidy answer and “build an audience that trusts you” doesn’t, but it’s the truer of the two.
It’s also worth saying that affiliate marketing and influencer marketing are increasingly the same conversation with different contracts attached, and if you’re weighing an affiliate deal against a flat sponsorship fee, it’s worth knowing what brands are paying for influencer work right now, because affiliate-only deals are often the cheaper option for the brand, not the better one for you.
What the day to day looks like once you’ve picked one
Choosing the network is the easy part, roughly an afternoon of applications and reading terms. The daily work afterwards is content, link placement, and checking which pieces are converting, none of which changes much whichever network you’re on. If you’re new to this and want a realistic picture before you commit any time to it, what affiliate marketing for beginners involves day to day is worth reading before you fill in a single application.
A quick, blunt recommendation
If you have under 5,000 monthly visitors and no track record: ShareASale first, Amazon Associates as backup, and revisit in six months.
If you have 5,000 to 50,000 monthly visitors in retail, travel, or finance: apply to Awin and one or two direct brand programmes, and drop the Amazon links on anything with a better paying alternative.
If you’re in the info-product or digital course space specifically: ClickBank can work, but check refund rates on the specific product before you promote it, not the network average.
If you already have six figures of traffic and want the biggest brand names: CJ Affiliate and Impact are worth the harder application, and by this stage you should also be tracking everything, because guesswork gets expensive at that volume.
Frequently asked questions
Which affiliate platform is easiest to get approved on as a complete beginner?
ShareASale approves new, low-traffic sites faster than almost any other major network, often within a day or two, which makes it the sensible first stop even though its average commissions sit in the middle of the pack rather than the top.
Do I need to join multiple affiliate networks or just one?
Join two or three. Most successful affiliates run Amazon Associates as a broad backup alongside one or two more specific networks like Awin or Impact, because no single network covers every brand your audience might want.
How much can you realistically earn from affiliate marketing platforms?
It depends far more on traffic and trust than on which platform you pick. A blog with 40,000 monthly sessions moved from £340 to £890 a month simply by switching networks on the same content, which shows the platform matters, but that same blog earned nothing at all in its first six months regardless of platform, because it had no audience yet.
Is ClickBank worth it for UK affiliates?
It can be, particularly for digital products and courses, but the advertised 50% to 75% commissions need discounting against refund and chargeback rates that can run 20% to 30% on weaker products, so check the specific product’s refund history before you promote it rather than trusting the headline percentage.
