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Affiliates
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.
back to
Sales and Customers
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