What unique incentives Recart and Tapcart are leaning towards in place of low commission payouts...

One of our partner managers, Nicholas Romaya of Recart.com, crushes it. He’s always in the conversation and bringing a ton of value to Recart’s agency partners in multiple ways.

I had a call with Nic last week about the true value of the commissions they pay their partners - how valuable is the average commission really? In his case it’s around $200/partner/month.

Further, how much CS time is spent with the website owners who are on free accounts.

And note, Recart have a robust course where they teach Shopify store owners how to do messenger marketing...

The conversation ended with a strategy:

1. Change monthly commission percentages into one flat upfront fee paid that day to partners for their referrals (I.e. $500 per referral). Use 25% of LTV average as a potential payout amount.
2. Choose a few top agency partners to offer to teach the robust course in place of Recart. Give them everything they need to teach it - assets, videos, support...
3. Finally, consider guaranteeing them students by paying for their users to take the course (ie $99 will be paid to the agency partner for teach each of their new users in this course). The fee is important because the agency would probably not run this course free of charge. But, if they gladly would for the leads alone... maybe the fee is not necessary. I’d still suggest offering it.

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What this creates for Recart is:

1. Immediate partner enablement and a reason to consider Recart referrals during slow revenue months.
2. Less CS hours on low LTV née user accounts (they would be placed with the agency for training).
3. More advocacy and activity amongst your partners.
4. Higher LTV of users bcs they are immediately learning what to do with your software - optimizations, integrations, copy, playbooks... from true marketing experts (not your partner team).
   
   
   I’d be curious to hear what any of you do to enable your partners to teach your users and funnel students their way?
   
   Or, if the up front payout is an interesting option for those of you with low commissions?

Here is the course Recart's partner put together >

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In a similar scenario, I had the same conversation with Tapcart.com's coo-founder as we were refining his partner program.

Tapcart has a slightly higher ACV then Recart, but it's still below $12K at the high end. And, they spend a lot of time with new clients in the onboarding process. Further, it's important to know that this tool is a 'gateway product'. In itself it is valuable, but for an agency, when Tapcart is setup, they now have a whole new world of services on the mobile app marketing side for their clients (i.e. new retainers and more billable hours).

Tapcart was considering 10-15% commission paid out in the typical quarterly fashion.

My suggestion was instead to change that payout into options for the agency:

What you would have paid in commissions becomes a conversation and offer back to the referring agency that looks something like this: 

"For referrals, we do something pretty unique that our partners love. Instead of paying out a low commission quarterly that you have to log into a PRM to get, like most partner programs, we offer our partners these three options for every referral that day:

1. Take $__ (_% of ACV) now in cash now via venmo or Paypal.
2. Take a larger % of ACV (2x) sponsorship dollars (MDF) reserved for your events, content...
3. Or, that same percentage can go to your client as a discount on the software.

Which one works best for you?"

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Here is one of our top agencies commenting on this strategy:

Premise - they have a course live right now that is only about marketing - not about the tools. We asked Chase what he'd need in order to consider appending tool-specific classes in that course (i.e. "Using Klaviyo to add messaging for after the email capture."). Here's his answer: 

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Links mentioned:

• Chase's new marrketing course >
• IMPACT's video selling course (with partner Vidyard) >
• Merchant mastery course from Recart's partners >
  
  

Awesome takeaway - IF you want to co-brand a course and ask your agency partner to teach the course, here are the minimums you'll need to supply them to get a "yes":

1. Make sure you are able to put their face/brand/links all over the collateral (as opposed to you owning all of the branding).
2. Give the agency clear expectations for where/how you are going to promote this.
3. Come to the conversation with a set of assets you are contributing so they know they will not have to do everything

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Does this make sense? Join the conversation in the Partner Programs Collective >>>