Social Snowball Review: Features, Integrations and Pricing

Looking for a way to streamline your affiliate program? You need affiliate tracking software to keep tabs on revenue, recruit new affiliates, and scale your program. And if you’re an ecommerce store, you definitely need one that integrates with Shopify. Social Snowball might be a worthy platform to consider. We’ll walk through all its core features, pricing, and limitations, then compare it with Tapfiliate to help you make an informed choice on your affiliate software solution.

Social Snowball Affiliate Tracking

Social Snowball is an affiliate tracking software dedicated to brands that use Shopify. It helps you harness word-of-mouth marketing across content creators, TikTok influencers, and even your own customers to promote your products through affiliate and referral partnerships. 

Social Snowball Key Features

Social Snowball offers a wide range of core features to support ecommerce brands with their affiliate program(s). We’ll walk through each one, along with relevant testimonials to speak to the feature’s ease of use.

Automated Affiliate Recruitment

This platform offers automated affiliate recruitment through its automated referrals. You can offer every customer a unique, personalized coupon code that they can begin using immediately to start converting new leads within their circle into commissions for themselves. Brands can then pay their newly converted customers with cash, gift cards, or store credit.

Payout Options

Brands have over 700 payout options to compensate affiliate partners and customers for referrals. They can choose from cash, gift cards, and store credit payments within a 2-click bulk payout function. Social Snowball also appeals to affiliates in this way, since they have the flexibility to decide where to redeem earnings on their self-serve portal.  

Attribution and ROI data for Influencer Marketing

Whether you have 50 or 500 influencers, Social Snowball lets you track all their revenue in one place. You can toggle through different ROI and attribution views depending on your affiliate program (if you have multiple). Additionally, you can view different charts depending on conversion types and performance levels for different affiliate groups, like top-performing affiliates, or affiliates promoting a certain product. 

Remove Code Leaks and Coupon Abuse

Coupon abuse occurs when someone (or a group of fraudsters) uses a coupon code more than once with fictitious personal details to obtain the same bonuses as a regular audience or customer. Unfortunately, this happens all too often with affiliate management platforms that don’t have security protocols in place. Social Snowball offers a unique product called Safelinks, which ensures all coupon codes are attributed to one unique affiliate link for every customer. This also protects from affiliate fraud and offers the added bonus of a personalized experience for your customers.

Automate Product Seeding

Product seeding is a way to reward affiliates’ performance with items in your online store or product catalog. You could toggle specific items for specific milestones, or even let affiliates choose their gift from a pre-set selection. Then, they can plug in their address details and automate an order on Shopify. This automation also extends to gifts at any milestone you choose, including onboarding. 

Affiliate Segmentation

Social Snowball gives brands the flexibility to customize different affiliate segments by program, incentive type, product, discount code, VIP or performance status, and more. You can also reward affiliates with different payout methods depending on their performance. For example, average affiliates could receive gift cards while higher-performing ones could obtain a higher-value gift card or cash.

Integration

Social Snowball’s richest integration is with Shopify, as brands can integrate their online stores into their program seamlessly. The platform also offers integrations to Postscript and Klaviyo to include marketing activities in your affiliate workflow, as well as sync your contacts and customer information. 

Can I Use Customization With Social Snowball?

Yes, Social Snowball offers a few customization options across various platform features like reporting, dashboards, commissions, and integrations. Let’s look at each way Social Snowball enables customization for your affiliate program and where customers see opportunities for improvement:

Affiliate dashboard

The platform’s affiliate dashboard shows a bird’s eye view of affiliate partnerships, onboarding status, number of referrals or conversions, and total revenue. You can customize your dashboard to show performance based on platform or affiliate. For example, TikTok affiliate marketing gets its own section. Additionally, you can customize your dashboard to display top-performing affiliates and revenue figures.

Emails

Social Snowball offers email flows to streamline affiliate management tasks like affiliate recruitment, announcements, and more. However, these emails don’t really allow for much customization, according to one soap manufacturer:

The emails that the app sends to new affiliates need to have an edit feature. Currently, the wording is not editable and comes across a bit overbearing and pushy with crazy looking emojis, which is not conducive to sites that cater to older and more professional clientele.

However, it’s worth noting that you can access email customization features if you integrate with Zapier or Mailchimp, though those are custom integrations only available on a higher-tier plan. Additionally, the platform’s direct Klaviyo integration could help brands customize affiliate emails. 

Affiliate signup form

Each subscription tier for Social Snowball’s plans includes customizable affiliate signup forms that allow you to pick questions to best assess affiliate candidacy for your program. It’s also worth noting that brands can create up to 4 different affiliate forms on the beginner plan, but will need to pay almost $500 monthly for the mid-tier plan to access different affiliate forms. 

Social media posts shared by affiliates

Brands can pre-create social media posts and share them with affiliate partners right on the Social Snowball platform. You can customize texts, styles, and colors to best meet your brand vibe and audience interests. Still, some customers feel this feature leaves more to be desired, like Suri from the UK:

They have “creatives/emails” that you can send using their platform but the text is really gamie and you can’t change it.

Integrations

Social Snowball offers custom integrations for brands that want to encompass a specific software into their affiliate workflow. However, custom integrations are only available to members of the highest pricing tier (Enterprise), which might cost anywhere between $600 to $5,000 monthly (custom plan).

Social Snowball Pricing Options

Social Snowball offers three pricing tiers, which all enable discount codes, safe links, integration access, and unlimited affiliate revenue. Here’s a quick look at a few more details for each pricing tier:

• Snow Day: $99 per month +3% commission: This basic plan is made for brands with new affiliate programs and includes unlimited affiliates and referrals, full access to all integrations, and 700 payout methods. In addition to the monthly fee, Social Snowball takes 3% of all affiliate revenue from brands on this beginner tier.
• Blizzard: $499 per month with no commission. The Blizzard plan is dedicated to brands with over $500,000 in monthly revenue from their Shopify store. It also includes up to 10 affiliate programs, priority customer support, white-glove onboarding and migration, and up to 10 sign-up forms.
• Enterprise: Price on application. Also dedicated to brands with over $500,000 in monthly Shopify revenue, the custom Enterprise plan includes custom integrations, unlimited affiliate programs, bespoke feature builds, a dedicated account manager, and a Slack connect channel access for quicker service.

What are Some Examples of Social Snowball’s Customers?

Social Snowball has a wide range of clients in the ecommerce niche, all with Shopify stores. Here’s a quick peek at their customer roster:

• Snappad: This RV leveling provider offers additional lifestyle RV products for a North American client base. They make almost 10% of their revenue from affiliate marketing with support from Social Snowball. 
• The Pod Company: Famous for selling individual ice baths, this DTC company relies heavily on customer referrals for revenue. 
• Sweet Dreams: This ecommerce business and sleep supplement provider leveraged Social Snowball to capture a wider audience on TikTok with influencer marketing and management.

What are Social Snowball Reviews Like?

Shopify has an overall user rating of 4.9 (out of 5 stars), with 154 five-star reviews and 10 lower ratings. Most reviews cite satisfaction with the platform’s intuitive user interface, responsive customer support, easy setup, and customer engagement potential. However, some customers point to inefficiencies like frequent bugs, slow load time, and difficulties in customization. Suri continues her review:

If you want to customise your messaging and touchpoints to be a smooth experience unfortunately this app needs more focus and dev support. Also support is based in Asia but works on California time so if your not there expect waiting the whole day for a response. I’m giving this a 3 as they do listen but the fact that customer facing bugs pop up and stay around for more than a week is painful as you’re trying to build an e-commerce experience that rocks.

The Magic Brand cites satisfaction with overall features, but laments the slow load times:

It’s fine. App is really slow. 50/50 on it. It does what it’s supposed to when it loads, but the app runs so slow sometimes.

Find the Best Affiliate Tracking Software for Your Affiliate Program

Wondering how to pick the right affiliate tracking software? Walk through our step-by-step process to find a tool that fits your budget, business goals, and industry.

Look at Your Needs

Consider what brought you to consider affiliate software in the first place. Do you need support in assessing performance across different affiliate groups or channels? Perhaps you’re looking to scale your operations with more automation and strategic reporting. Whatever your business goal, match those up with features you’d need to accomplish it through your software and go from there. 

Do Some Research

Your first stop? Your network. If you have other contacts or colleagues with experience in affiliate programs within your business industry, chances are they’ve used affiliate tracking software. Poke around Linkedin or your office to learn about any solid experiences people have had with software. Beyond that? Start with a simple Google search and look for affiliate software with customers in your niche, or similar in size to your business. 

Can You Integrate?

Integrations make the world go ‘round, especially if we’re talking about the marketing world. Most affiliate tools integrate with a few different software tools in various niches, especially payment and compensation platforms. But you should also look at industry-specific platforms as well. If you’re a SaaS business, ideally 

Figure Out Your Budget

Most software offer subscriptions across a sliding scale to meet different business and budgetary needs. Still, software costs vary widely, anywhere from $80 monthly to over $2,000 for more robust enterprise plans. 

Focus on the non-negotiable features you decided on in step 1 and make sure your budget has the room to accommodate them. If you notice a software feels too pricey, always bring it back to the features you can’t live without to decide if it’s worth signing on. 

Use Free Trials

This is the software company’s opportunity to put their money where their mouth is. If their software is so good, surely a free trial wouldn’t impact their bottom line if most users found enough value to subscribe, right? Look for tools with a 14-day free trial to test out all the features you dreamt about in the consideration stage. Figure out how easy it is to recruit affiliates, access reports, customize the interface, and toggle with commission structures during your trial. And don’t forget to test out how responsive the customer support team is as well. 

Look at How Easy the Software is to Use

Assess how quickly you can get from point A to B — or in this case, from affiliate group to different reporting views. Your affiliate tracking software should feel intuitive and user-friendly, as well as with a visually appealing user interface. This is a great aspect to examine during your free trial; however, it’s always a good idea to search for any public reviews with comments about the platform’s user interface as well. 

Take Security into Consideration

Affiliate fraud is no joke — and the best affiliate tracking software will protect its users from it. Especially for brands with larger-scale affiliate programs, it’s easy for a few shady affiliates or fraudulent clicks or commissions to leak through. 

Look at Customer Service

Customer service should be accessible on multiple channels, whether thats a resource library rich with how-to articles or 24/7 live chat to resolve issues as they come. Ideally, you should be able to reach a customer service rep in no less than 24 hours, even on weekends. Plus, they should offer support in your language, not only English. 

Our advice? Look at customer testimonials and reviews on software rating websites to assess an affiliate software’s customer service level. 

A Value for Money Alternative to Social Snowball: Tapfiliate Affiliate Software

Integrations

Tapfiliate has 34 direct integrations with some of the most common software solutions in our clients’ tech stack. From email marketing platforms like Mailchimp to payment processors like PayPal and Stripe, our integrations smooth out business operations and activate in as little as a few clicks. Specialized ecommerce and learning platforms are also included on our roster, like BigCommerce, Learnable, and Wix.

We also offer the REST API and JavaScript-enabled integrations to help you integrate other software solutions that you don’t see on our direct integration list. Plus, our developer docs help the coder on your team implement things with ease.

Pricing

Tapfiliate is a scalable affiliate management platform. Meaning? Our pricing subscriptions suit every type of business, whether you’re in the beginning stages or looking to scale and streamline. All our plans offer access to our wide range of integrations, flexible commissions, real-time reporting, live support, and unlimited affiliate programs.

• Essential: $89/month. Ideal for startups and brands with new affiliate programs, this plan includes 20,000 tracked clicks, unlimited affiliates, up to $2,000 tracked conversions, data exporting, deep links, and coupon codes.
• Pro: $149/month. Built for scaling affiliate programs, our pro plan includes up to 10,000 tracked conversions and 100,000 tracked clicks, item-based commissions, bonuses, affiliate groups, and private creative assets.  
• Enterprise: Custom. Unlimited tracking requests, advanced MLM sales goals, white labeling, custom verbiage, and premium support.

Multi-currency

As a global brand ourselves, we at Tapfiliate know how important it is to ensure compensation is aligned across different locations. Our skilled employees live across the globe and we pay them in the currency of their residence through various payment platforms, so we enable the same courtesy for brands using our software.

Multi-Language

Catering to a global audience? It’s hard to market with affiliates in Germany when your promotional materials and software communications are only available in English. 

Plus, what if you hired international customer service representatives? They’ll need to be able to communicate in their prominent language, ideally a language that some of your clients communicate in as well. Feel at ease with Tapfiliate’s multi-language availability and customer support, with our dashboard available in six different languages.

Works for Affiliate, Referral and Influencer Programs

Partnership marketing is a wide niche and Tapfiliate appeals to every aspect of it with compatible tracking for affiliate, referral, and influencer programs. 

Advanced social sharing for branded assets makes every influencer’s life easier on TikTok, Instagram, and other social channels. Plus, our link sharing and discount codes are easy for influencers to share and promote on their stories or posts alike. 

Additionally, Tapfiliate enables custom triggers to invite customers to join your referral program. You can toggle these invitations to go out after a set number of purchases or transactions. 

Flexible Commissions

Tapfiliate offers one of the most flexible commission packages for affiliates across the affiliate tracking industry. You can select different commission types, values, and automated increase thresholds based on performance. 

Our SaaS clients love our recurring commissions to reward affiliates not only for subscription signups, but also for the length of time a customer continues to stay signed on with a product. Similarly, ecommerce brands relish the ease in which they can sell large quantities of overstocked products with our item-specific commissions that can incentivize more sales. 

Pick from flat-fee or percentage-based commissions depending on your business goals, and even enable lifetime commissions to reward affiliates for every customer purchase, not just one. 

Automation

No business is efficient in 2023 without some sort of automation. And even in the sub-niche of affiliate marketing, endless tasks eat up precious hours that you can spend actually building your program or catering to customers. That’s why Tapfiliate offers a wide range of automation features to make the brand marketer’s life just a little easier. 

Our custom triggers help you automate notifications and announcements to affiliates without you having to sit down and craft an email every time. You can also preset actions to take place when there’s a dispute or refund request, allowing you to keep your marketing dollars and avoid spending them on commissions that don’t correspond to an actual sale. Finally, the possibilities for workflow automation become endless with our deep integration with Zapier.

White Labeling

We’re proud to offer completely white-labeled pages for businesses that place heavy emphasis on solid, cohesive branding across every business operation, interaction, and experience. The best part? We offered white-labeled pages at a much more affordable price point than much of our competition. Even in our lower tiers, brands can customize logos and colors on their affiliate dashboards, resulting in a more brand-aligned experience for employees and affiliates alike. 

Social Snowball Affiliate Management vs Tapfiliate Affiliate Management

Social Snowball and Tapfiliate both have strong reviews for affiliate tracking potential, customer support, and reporting dashboards. Still, Tapfiliate offers more robust features for a wider audience, at a more affordable price.

Looking for affiliate tracking software for your SaaS or ecommerce biz? Tapfiliate’s real-time tracking, reporting, and customization features might be a solid fit.

Affiliate Program Management

Social Snowball offers a range of program management features like affiliate recruitment, automation, and unique commission structures to streamline your Shopify business’s affiliate or customer referral program. However, Tapfiliate offers more customization potential for businesses of all niches, sizes, and types (more than just on Shopify) to make the experience as branded and tailored as possible for both the brand and its affiliates. 

Tracking and Reporting Analytics:

Both Tapfiliate and Social Snowball offer real-time reporting and analytics that brands can access on various dashboards. Social Snowball offers easily adjustable views to see reporting data based on affiliate groups, individual affiliates, or channels. Tapfiliate offers similar reporting views and more, with custom segments and powerful filtration to help you assess performance and ROI across different products, commission groups, affiliates, time periods, and tracking type.

Customization:

Customization features on Social Snowball are user-friendly and accessible. You can customize different reporting views, email flows, and affiliate sign-up forms to better tailor your affiliate program. However, Social Snowball tends to focus more on automation than customization. Tapfiliate, on the other hand, offers much more in-depth customization options with commission structures, auto-approved affiliates, email templates, dashboard colors and logos, and even white-labeled pages. Furthermore, Social Snowball’s customization suite caters solely to Shopify’s landscape, making it inaccessible to brands that don’t use Shopify.

Craving more control, detail, and brand alignment in your affiliate program? Explore Tapfiliate’s customization features!

Automation

Both Social Snowball and Tapfiliate have automated referral programs where you can automate invitations to existing customers to become affiliates. Additionally, Social Snowball offers automated product seeding, which rewards affiliates with gifts from your product catalog once they meet preset milestones. 

Tapfiliate offers similar automation features, but offers more wiggle room in trigger rules to give you more control over your program. Plus, our integration with Zapier makes it easy to automate workflows across different marketing sections within your affiliate program, too. 

Keep in mind, also, that Social Snowball’s automation features are pretty unique to Shopify, while Tapfiliate offers a bit more diversity. 

Support:

Both platforms have multiple channels to access customer support, including premium support for higher-tier plans, resource libraries, and live chat. Customer reviews for both software cite satisfaction with customer support responsiveness and competence, though Tapfiliate stands out in resource volume and premium support at a better price.

Live chat is available on both platforms, but Tapfiliate’s 24/7 access is available to all subscribers. Social Snowball has a live chat option, but the speedy responsiveness on their enterprise Slack channel is only offered to brands signed up for the highest tier.

Additionally, Tapfiliate’s resource library and developer docs are more extensive and comprehensive to support brands troubleshooting issues solo. 

Both platforms are recognized for providing accessible and responsive customer support, though the exact experience can vary depending on the issue and support channel used.

Pricing:

Both platforms offer a relatively affordable beginner subscription, with Social Snowball’s at $99 per month and Tapfiliate’ at $89. However, it’s crucial to note that beginner subscribers to Social Snowball must also shell out 3% commission to Social Snowball themselves, which is not required on any of Tapfiliate’s plans. With us, your affiliate revenue remains entirely yours. Plus, Tapfiliate offers unlimited affiliate programs on all of our pricing tiers, while Social Snowball only offers 10 on its $499/month middle tier.

And if you’re interested in custom integrations? Tapfiliate offers that potential with all our pricing plans, whereas Social Snowball only offers it on its more expensive custom enterprise plan. 

FAQs about Social Snowball

What is Social Snowball?

Social Snowball is an affiliate tracking software for ecommerce businesses that use Shopify. It helps you recruit new customers as affiliates, automate incentives, track attribution and ROI, and manage multiple affiliate programs in one place.

What are the limitations of Social Snowball?

Social Snowball is a niche affiliate software that only caters to brands that use Shopify. If you’re not on Shopify, you can’t use Social Snowball. 

Additionally, some of its affiliate tracking and engagement features are quite expensive to access on its mid-tier subscription ($499 per month), making it inaccessible to some newer businesses. Finally, the platform doesn’t offer additional currencies or languages to cater to more global affiliate programs. 

Who are Social Snowball’s competitors?

Social Snowball largely caters to businesses with online stores with Shopify websites that want to launch or enhance affiliate influencer and referral programs. Here are a few affiliate tracking software options in their competitor roster:

Tapfiliate: This scalable and user-friendly affiliate management platform caterers to large and small businesses alike in the ecommerce, SaaS, and dropshipping niches. With an automated referral program, ecommerce integrations, and real-time tracking, Tapfiliate helps brands create, track, and optimize their affiliate marketing programs. 

Refersion: This affiliate tracking platform services ecommerce businesses, ideally at the enterprise, high-revenue level with customizable commission structures, real-time reporting, and access to a partnership marketplace to recruit new affiliates. 

Post Affiliate Pro: This comprehensive affiliate management software offers a wide range of tracking methods (cookie, pixel, IP referrals, impressions), multiple reporting views like trends and top performance, promotional materials for affiliate engagement and ease, as well as a customizable user interface and diverse integrations. 

Impact: Impact provides a more extensive suite of tools for partnership management, including affiliate and influencer marketing, as well as other types of business partnerships. It’s known for its robust analytics and flexible contracting options.

PartnerStack: PartnerStack’s affiliate software focuses more on B2B companies, PartnerStack offers a learning management system to onboard affiliates, co-branded promotional materials, lead sharing, deals for resellers, and unique commission structures.

Curious about more Social Snowball competitors? Check out our full roundup of affiliate management software alternatives.

Ready to level up your affiliate program? Sign up for 👉 Tapfiliate’s 14-day trial today!