Affiliate marketing: An overview and analysis of emerging literature

Affiliate marketing is a prominent, contemporary type of performance-based internet marketing whereby a firm reimburses affiliates for each customer referred through the affiliate's marketing effort. This paper aims to review all existing studies on affiliate marketing (i.e., web-based affiliate marketing) to understand the overall development in this area of research. The search results on affiliate marketing and related terminologies found a total of eighteen studies on this topic. The review clearly indicates the lack of research effort in this area. In addition to exploring the key findings of eighteen studies on affiliate marketing, this research reviewed these studies to analyse their keywords, benefits, methodologies, limitations and future research directions, critical success factors, and recommendations. The findings clearly indicate that there has not been any literature review undertaken on this topic. The study also provides its research contribution and limitations and future research directions based on this review.