Affiliate marketing is what has been behind the success of many of the largest online stores in the world. Are there other Web sites on the Internet that may be interested in promoting your products, or just talking about them? If the answer is yes, then it may be a good idea for you to set up an affiliate program. The concept of using affiliates is simple: a Web site other than yours refers potential customers to your store and, if they order, receives a commission on the sale. Affiliates can generate significant incremental revenues for your store, and are rewarded in doing so by the commissions that you will pay out to them. To implement an affiliate marketing program, you need a system that tracks who referred the customer that made an order, and keeps a log of commissions accrued by each referrer. Your store provides you with a basic affiliate management system. To set up a new affiliate program, follow these steps:

o Create a new affiliate. To create a new affiliate, select Sales Menu / Affiliates. The window with a form will be displayed. To set up the new affiliate Web site: add a name for this affiliate, a contact e-mail, and the commission rate. If the rate is 11.50%, enter 11.5. Your store will automatically generate a unique ID for the new affiliate, which is what will be used to identify orders coming from its Web site.

o Generate links for the affiliate. For Your store to recognize which affiliate referred a certain customer, the link that the customer clicks on must contain special code that identifies the affiliate. For example, let's say that a Web site would like to insert on their Web pages a link to your store so that whatever a customer buys, they would get a commission.

This is the exact same link that you are using on your own Web site to link any page of your site to the store's front page, except for the code that appears at the end of the link: "idaffiliate=9". This code identifies that affiliate number 9 is the one sending the customer to your Web site. Without the identifier, Your store would not recognize that a Web site referred the customer, and you would not know if you owed a commission. List commissions reports. Periodically, you will have to generate reports to see how many sales your affiliates have generated and calculate their commissions. To obtain a quick snapshot of sales generated by affiliates click on list commissions.

Note: If your affiliate network grows to a point where computing and paying commissions becomes too time consuming, you may want to investigate other systems that can help you manage that part of your store. Sophisticated affiliate management systems are available in the market, allowing you to do things such as automatically computing and paying your affiliates, applying different discounts for different products, and much more.

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