Affiliate System

What is the affiliate system?

The affiliate system allows you to pay people for referring traffic and sales to your website. For example, you could pay 10% commission. All you would have to do is give each affiliate an unique URL to direct traffic to, and the affiliate system will track all visitors through to the sale. Therefore, you can easily run a report to view the amount/commission each affiliate has earned so far. The affiliate can also login to their account anytime to view their statistics.

How to setup the affiliate system:

Navigate to Marketing > Affiliates and click on the Affiliate Settings tab

From this page you will be able to setup the payout percentage rates on the total sales generated by the affiliate. The payout may reach 5 levels deep, based on one affiliate referring another affiliate.

For example, each new affiliate is always at level 1. So, if level 1 payout percentage is set to 0.05, the affiliate will earn 5% of all sales he/she generates. If he/she refers another affiliate, that affiliate will become level 2, and the original affiliate will earn a percentage of sales generated by this new affiliate. If this new affiliate happens to refer another affiliate, the original affiliate AGAIN may collect a percentage of this new affiliates generated sales. This may continue up to 5 levels deep.

Keep in mind that each new affiliate starts at his/her own level 1, whereas he/she can refer 5 levels deep as well which is explained as follows:

The Affiliate payout section of the affiliate area lists the parent ID for each affiliate. If the ID is 0 then the affiliate was the first person to sign up. If the parent ID is a different number then the person is signed up under that affiliate.

For example, if Affiliate A signed up and was assigned ID # 2, his Parent ID is 0. If Affiliate B then signed up under Affiliate A, his ID would be # 3 and his Parent ID would be # 2.

You may also set the Config_AffiliateMinimumCheck configuration variable to the minimum total earnings you require before you will generate and mail a check to the affiliate.

For example, your policy might be a $25.00 minimum check, because you don't want to write checks for $2.00 each month, you'd rather wait until their check is worth mailing.

If you create banner ads for your affiliates to use, simply upload them to:

  • (your templates images folder)/banners/banner1.gif
  • (your templates images folder)/banners/banner2.gif
  • (your templates images folder)/banners/banner3.gif

The default directory is (your store)/templates/1/images/banners/.

EXAMPLE: /templates/1/images/banners/banner1.gif

Banners can be any size. There is currently support for only 3 banners, as described above. You may upload the banners to your server via FTP.

How to edit the affiliate pages text:

The affiliate sign-up process consists of the following 3 pages:

  1. Affiliate_info.asp
  2. Affiliate_signup.asp
  3. Affiliate_thankyou.asp

You may edit the text on all of the above pages by going to Webmaster > Website Text from the home page of your admin area. Please note that the Affiliate_thankyou.asp page by default tells the customer to "please allow 24 hours for your account to be activated". This is actually not true, as their account is activated immediately. However, the reason this message is worded this way by default is to protect you, the store owner, and give you time to review their new registration and cancel it if necessary. If this is not a concern, feel free to change the message to say the following:

"Thank you for becoming an affiliate, please click the 'My Account' link located in the top right corner of this website to login to your account. Once you've logged in, you'll see a 'View my affiliate page' link where you can download banner ads and track your success."
How the sign-up process works:

Customers may sign-up to become an affiliate at http://www.yourdomain.com/affiliate_info.asp. Once they sign-up, you will receive an e-mail notification at the address specified in the Config_EmailAddress_AffiliateNotification variable.

Note: No email is sent to the customer, only to the administrator

At this point, the customer is already in your system as an affiliate. You may then review the new affiliates account information, and if for any reason you do not want the customer to be an affiliate, you may cancel it by:

  1. Navigate to Customers > Customers
  2. Find the new affiliates customer record
  3. Edit the record by changing the Access Key from Partner (P) to Customer (C)
  4. You may also completely remove the affiliate account. Go to Marketing > Affiliates from the home page of your admin area. Check the check box located at the right hand side of the record for the Customer's affiliate record and click Save Changes

Customers who are Affiliates also have access to an additional section of web pages in their My Account manager. These additional pages allow the customer to automatically generate banner ads, as well as view their current statistics and earnings. A customer can track total click-throughs generated, as well as how many of those clicks actually convert to sales.

How to give certain affiliates different commissions:

  1. Navigate to Marketing > Affiliates, and click on the Affiliate Payouts tab
  2. You can edit existing affiliates and change their commission percentages, as well as how many days affiliates are tracked for. For example, 7 days to track, means that if a customer visits your website through an affiliate link, that customer's computer is tagged with that affiliate for 7 days. So, if the customer visits the website 3 days later and places an order, that affiliate will still get commission from the sale. If the customer returns on the 6th day and orders AGAIN, the affiliate will again get more commission. If the customer places an order again on the 8th day, the affiliate will no longer get any commission.

However, if the customer does not directly visit your website thereafter, and for some reason the customer continues to visit the affiliates website and clicks on their affiliate URL every time they visit your website, then the affiliate will continue to get commission. Each time they click on the affiliate URL, the days to track is reset, for example back to another 7 days.

Note: When entering the percentages an Affiliate should earn, the values must be entered in decimal format. So if you wanted level 1 to be 5%, then you would enter the value as 0.05.

How to pay your affiliates each month:
  1. Navigate to Marketing > Affiliates, and click on the Pay Affiliates tab.
  2. When you are ready to pay all the affiliates listed on this page, click the link print all checks for the selected period.
  3. Enter the text to use as the date and memo sections of the checks, then click Print Checks. If you have the correct check paper, you may automatically print out the checks; otherwise you may just view the checks on-screen and write the checks manually.
  4. After printing, or manually writing all checks, click Yes, I've successfully printed all checks. This will let your database know you have paid the balance amount to all affiliates.