I sell a physical product as well (which Click bank doesn't allow) and was looking for an easy and cheap affiliate program. After searching around a while I found PayDotCom

You can check out their site and get all the details at PayDotCom.com

You can see my product page at ShowOffCards Affiliate Page

They are new with a few rough edges but I am seeing improvement every day

Hope this helps.

Thank you for the suggestion. It appears that PayDotCom has a good product (you do too, btw!). How do you/they ensure that affiliates get their referral fees?

It seems like affiliates could easily miss earned commissions since payment may come at a different time from the actual order. With your site for example, if someone doesn't fill out the "referred by" field on the sign up form, how do you know who deserves a commission check?

Again, it looks like a simple solution that could work (I'll probably use it to start), but I think the uncertainty of payment may deter affiliate-generated traffic.

Am I missing something?

I am certainly not an expert (which is why I went to a third party affiliate program) but here is how I understand it.

When you sign up to sell your product you will give them the url of your landing page and the URL of your payment page.

When someone signs up as an affiliate, they get access to several links they can use in emails, websites etc to refer people to your site.

When a visitor follows one of the affiliate links they get sent to your landing page but it magically has the referring affiliate info in the url. I assume the visitor gets a cookie at that point.

Later, when they get to your payment page, the pay button takes them to PayDotCom and they are then routed to PayPal or Paystorm to complete the transaction. I can only assume that when they pass through PayDotCom they check for an affiliate cookie and that determines who gets paid.
On my site, after you submit the ShowOffCards sign up for you get directed to the payment page. Take a look at the url when you mouse over my payment button.
My Payment Page

You are required to have one sale before your product goes live in the PayDotCom marketplace. I ran a test order and it all worked...
It could all be done with smoke and mirrors for all I know but so far so good /biggrin.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="biggrin.gif" />

Thanks, again for the info. I'll definitely be trying this one out to see how it goes.