Bringing Affiliate In-House to cut costs & eliminate fraud.

The situation

Aroma 360 and Hotel Collection ran their affiliate growth almost entirely through third-party networks: Awin, CJ Affiliate, Rakuten and Refersion. The networks delivered reach, but they also meant network fees on every sale, limited visibility into partner quality, and tracking I did not fully control. Two problems were costing real money: fraud slipping through the networks, and double payments where the same conversion was credited across more than one network.

What I did

I designed, developed and helped build an in-house affiliate platform that ran alongside the existing network programs and gradually took the best partners direct.

I migrated high-value affiliates off the networks and onboarded them into the owned program, so the brands paid partners directly instead of paying network override on top. I rebuilt tracking from the ground up, postbacks, cookies, pixels and clean attribution windows, so every conversion was tied to one source and credited once. That alone closed the double-payment leak.

I built the fraud and payment controls the networks were not giving us: dedup logic across sources, validation rules on conversions, and review on partner activity, which let me catch and stop the fraud that had been draining the program.

I then launched an AI partner-search tool that found and qualified high-fit affiliates and onboarded them directly into the in-house program. Instead of waiting for network publishers to opt in, I could identify the right partners, bring them in direct, and keep full control over terms, tracking and payout from day one.

The results

• Monthly revenue grew from $150K to $1.5M in six months.

• Recovered roughly $150K per month that had been lost to transaction fraud.

• Eliminated double payments by consolidating attribution into one owned source of truth.

• Cut network fees by shifting top affiliates from third-party programs to the in-house platform.

• Built an AI partner-search pipeline that onboarded qualified affiliates directly, with full program control.

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Tools and networks

Awin, CJ Affiliate, Rakuten, Refersion, in-house affiliate platform, AI affiliates/influencers partner-search tool, Everflow with in-house dev tools, postback/cookie/pixel tracking, fraud and attribution controls.

Watsup for consultation: +1 (786) 850 7140