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 for example. All you'd have to do is give each affiliate a 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 whenever you want to see how much money each affiliate has earned thus far. The affiliate can also login to their account anytime and view their statistics.

How to setup the affiliate system:

Click "Affiliate System Setup" from the home page of your admin area. 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 affiliate's 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.

You may also set the "Config_AffiliateMinimumCheck" 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 are 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 signup process consists of the following 3 pages:

Affiliate_info.asp
Affiliate_signup.asp
Affiliate_thankyou.asp

You may edit the text on all of the above pages by going to "Manage Articles & 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:

How the signup process works:
Customers may signup to become an affiliate at "http://www.yourdomain.com/affiliate_info.asp". Once they signup, 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 affiliate's account information, and if for any reason you do not want the customer to be an affiliate, you may cancel it by:

1) Click "View All Customers"
2) Find the new affiliate's 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 by clicking "View All Affiliates" from the home page of your admin area, locating the appropriate Customer's affiliate record, and deleting it.

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-thoughs generated by them, as well as how many of those clicks actually became sales.

How to give certain affiliates different commissions:

1) Click on "Change Individual Affiliate Payouts" on the home page of your admin area.
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 comes back to the website 3 days later and orders something, 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 buys something again on the 8th day, the affiliate will no longer get any commission. However if the customer does not come directly to your website thereafter, and for some reason the customer continues to visit the affiliate's website and clicks on their affiliate URL every time they come to 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.

How to pay your affiliates each month:
1) Click on "Write Checks / Pay Affiliates" on the home page of your admin area.
2) Then if you're 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've paid all amounts current balances.