Affiliate Setup

Most of the form fields in Affiliate Setup are pre-populated from information we collected when you registered. You may want to change some of the information like the name of your affiliate program, the admin email, or the default URL. You can change the commission structure to suit your needs. This help file will also give you detailed instructions for customizing your affiliate center.

Commission Structure

You can choose to pay affiliates on one or two tiers. A one-tier system rewards affiliates only for their direct sales. This system is best if you are participating in joint ventures and want to pay a higher commission on direct sales. A two-tier system rewards affiliates for their direct sales and sales generated by sub-affiliates. A sub-affiliate is an someone who registers for your program after being referred by an affiliate.

The cookie name defines the cookie that is set in a prospects browser when they click on an affiliate link. This cookie is retrieved at a later date to track sales for that affiliate and give them commission. The cookie expiration determines the length of time that the cookie will remain in the prospect's browser and the affiliate will be eligible for commission. For example, if you set the cookie to expire in one year, affiliates will earn commission from sales generated if a customer returns to your site with one year.

Affiliate Follow-up

If you want to send a welcome message to each affiliate who signs up for your program, you need to create a list for your affiliates.

You can also add unlimited follow-up messages to train your affiliates and keep them motivated. The critical follow-up period is during the first two weeks. Daily training messages for the first week is highly recommended. One merchant set up an autoresponse series that spanned an entire year with weekly tips to help his affiliates make more sales.

Affiliate HTML Code

Select Affiliate from the main menu and click Signup/Login to generate HTML Code to link to your affiliate registration and login pages. Click "Signup" or "Login" on the right to test the code. Copy and paste the HTML code into your web page to create a link or use it in an email message to promote your program.

Using the Affiliate Software with Your Existing Ecommerce System

You can track your sales and commissions by adding a simple image tag to the confirmation page of your shopping cart or order processing script. The only required variables are $amount, $ordernumber, and $adminid. Here is an example:

<img src="$cgiurl/sale.cgi?adminid=123&ordernumber=999&amount=19.95">

Here are all the possible values you can pass to the script:

$adminid = Your Admin ID*
$amount = The Product's Price*
$ordernumber = The Order ID*
$name = The Customer's Name
$email = The Customer's Email
$product= The Product's Name

If you are using a third-party processing system like ClickBank, you cannot pass variables to a script. Instead, you can hardcode the product's name, ordernumber, and price into the tag.

* Required