To earn money with affiliate marketing, you will need to be an active member of a merchant's affiliate program and that merchant's affiliate network (e.g., to work with Nordstrom, you need to be accepted both into Nordstrom's affiliate program and into LinkShare, Nordstrom's affiliate network). Only after you have been accepted to both can you begin promoting their products and deals.
Each network assigns affiliates a unique ID for tracking purposes. For your sales to track properly, you must have the correct affiliate IDs (from the correct profiles, PIDs, and even channels) in your Rakuten PopShops Account Settings. For network-specific help entering your IDs, please click on 'Add ID' in your Account Settings.
To publish a shop or any offers using Rakuten PopShops ShopBuilder you need to have access to the HTML of your website which generally requires FTP access or administrative privileges. Rakuten PopShops does not build or host websites, so if you don't already have one you'll need to find a host that supports Javascript or PHP and cURL and decide on a web publishing platform (such as WordPress). If you run into issues with your shop not publishing correctly, ask your hosting company if cURL is supported and enabled.
If you don't already have one, you should find a hosting company that offers unlimited domain hosting and reliable customer support. (Most hosts offer a trial period. We suggest taking advantage of that trial and contacting customer support to ensure good responsiveness.) DreamHost has good customer support and an easy-to-use control panel. We've arranged a $50 discount off a one-year hosting plan. To receive the discount use coupon code POPSHOPS.