Managing The Affiliate Program

The shopping cart affiliate program allows anyone to pay commissions for referred sales to their website. The program is limited in scope to fit our very low hosting price but powerful enough for any business using this system and acquiring internet based sales.

The program is standard but will not be available unless you configure it and add the main login to one of your pages. The inclusion code to add the login and signup to your main pages is %%include-affiliate%%.

The program allows you to have 100 active affiliate marketers with unlimited monthly sales. Accounts can be set up automatically with the web based signup or manually by the website administrator.

Each affiliate will receive the set percentage in commission for each sale.

The give the merchant the most flexibility we have set an override percentage for each individual account. so you can designate different commissions for every affiliate, rewarding active affiliates with higher percentages.

An additional feature allows you to discount sales for each affiliate. This will let you offer the affiliate codes as coupons that give buyers discounts while tracking sales referrals and crediting the affiliate.

Main Configuration

• Cookie Duration - Cookie duration is the number of days after the initial referral when the customer can return to the website and make a purchase that is still credited to the affiliate.

• Payout Percentage - The percentage of the sale price that will be paid as a commission to the affiliate.

• Pay Flat Rate - Rather than paying a commission for a sale, you can pay one standard fee for each occurrence. This also works well for referrals for business services. You pay for the customer and not based on the sale amount. If the payout percentage and the flat rate are set, the commission will be whichever is higher. This lets you designate minimum payouts on each sale.

• Affiliate Discount Rate - You can set a discount rate based on any affiliate ID. This allows the affiliate the ability to market the discount to their customers if they buy your products. The main configuration will apply to all accounts however each affiliate can be set to a unique percentage.

• Public Signup - Enabling the open signup will let anyone join your affiliate program via your signup page. If you disable the public signup, only accounts you set up in the management console can participate.

• Checkout Form - You can include a text box on the checkout page for customers to enter an affiliate code. By giving a discount, you ensure that the customer will enter the code. This feature allows you to offer non internet based affiliates commissions. If the customer is referfed by a web affiliate the text box will not show up on the page since the code is already acquired by a cookie.

Managing Affiliates - To manage the affiliates use the "List / Manage All Affiliates" link in the affiliate program management page. The page will list all of the registered affiliates with their contact details and a link to edit or remove each affiliate.

You can edit any affiliate and change the percentage they will earn on each sale as well as the discount rate they can offer to their customers.

You can remove an affiliate, however, the sales logs will still have the affiliate id if there have been any sales. The only data reference for matching the id with the actual payee is the affiliate datafile. If you are removing an affiliate that has had sales, you should have some type of backup record. You will most likely already will have it recorded in your business accounting records.

Uploding Banners - Banners must be under 50KB each and no more than 780 pixels wide. The banner size is limited so they do not overload the pages they are displayed on. The linking codes for the banners are automatically added to the affiliate management area. All you have to do is upload the banner in your management console. The management console allows for 4 banners, but you have an entire website and we encourage you to add a banner gallery that affiliates can choose from.

The banner uploader just makes the process clean and simple. After the first 4, you need to add then to your own pages with the linking instructions.

Banners can be jpg or gif format. Animated banners are in gif format but still must be under the 50kb size limit.

All banner codes given to the affiliates will pull the banners from your website when the pages are accessed. If you remove a banner, make sure you replace it or the affiliate's website will have a broken image rather than the banner. Likewise, if you change the banner, the new banner will appear on all the affiliate websites.

Commission Payouts - The payout logs are stored for 6 months. After 6 months all logs are automatically deleted. So make sure you download the affiliate logs each month to your accounting software. Unlike sales, you may not have pay outs for several months, so it is imperative that you maintain good and complete records.

To access the payout logs, simply select the month and year of the logs and a format to display the logs in. Logs can be displayed in plain text list for manual payouts and CSV format for import to excel, quickbooks or other accounting software. The pipe delimited format is MS Access compatible as well as most spreadsheet software like excel or Open Office.

The list will give you the payee, address and amount so you can either import the data into any check writing program to mail out affiliate checks with some automation or manually make out checks.

The program only records the sales and commissions. If you have chargebacks, returns or hold payouts until minimum payout levels are reached, you will need to do that outside the website. The website compiles the data but does not do the accounting for you. That should be part of your own business model.

Linking to Pages - When each of your affliates logs in, they will be provided links to link to the browse or estore programs. The program has been expanded to allow linking to any page or program on your website. Ideally you will link to the product pages, but you can link to any page including the home page as long as you add in the affiliate linking code to the page.

For example if you have e-commerce-inc.com you would link to
https://e-commerce-inc.com?&affid=USERNAME

The USERNAME would be replaced with the actual affiliate's login. By adding the "?&affid=USERNAME" to the end of any page URL you can link to any html page on your website. This lets you link to special promotions or unique features on your website.

You will need to create an auxillary page explaining the links to your affiliates since they are not part of the standard links in the affiliate login area.

Expanding The Program Pages - Since the program is extremely configurable and flexible it is up to you to build a policy page and terms or contracts between yourself and the affiliates. Expand the the program with information pages and help on affiliate marketing.

Provide resources such as banners and tips on how to sell your product.

The more you build on the tools you provide for your affiliates, the better your program will perform. Remember, the affiliate program is just the vehicle to drive the campaign, you need to steer the vehicle and drive it down the right road.

More Help - If you plan to run an open affiliate program it would be worthwhile to investigate other companies doing the same. Learn what problems affiliates can cause, the legal issues of paying commissions and the tax records required by the IRS.

As your business grows by using affiliates, the legal issues also compound and the dynamic of your business model change dramatically. If you have 100 people actively selling your product the number of sales should greatly increase and so will the legal liability.

Bad affiliates can be bad for business and it it important you have a way to get out of any contracts you enter when they begin to damage your business.

The more you learn in advance about running an affiliate program the easier it will be once your program starts expanding your business.

The internet is full of resources and information that should be very helpful in understanding what you should expect from your affiliate program.