Affiliates

Introduction | Settings | Banners | Mass-Pay

Introduction - Affiliates Management System

With the Affiliates Module, you can manage an up to 3-tiered commissions system, paying your affiliates for the sales they help generate.

Any registered user can be an affiliate, they just need the check the 'Affiliate?' checkbox in their preferences. Once enabled they will see:

1. A link to a page of their detailed statistics
2. A list of banners you have created to promote your site - with their unique ID embedded in them
3. A list of products you have for sale, and the commissions available on them

You, as the admin, get access to:

1. View user's detailed affiliate stats from the Users Manager and User Edit pages.
2. You can display users stats on any page by including this code in your HTML:
   <? include 'o3/aff/affiliate-stats.php'; ?>
   
3. You can view overall stats in the Stats page.
4. You can use PayPal MassPay to pay yor affiliates in bulk. See the Mass Pay page.

O3 handles all the back-end stuff automatically. Users are cookied with their referrer's ID so they can be tracked. When they purchase things, the referrer ID is always recorded along wih the sale enabling the stats to be calculated...

Settings

The settings for the Affiliates module are under 'Affiliates' in the Settings. They are:

• Link-Back Page - The page affiliates should send customers to (by default). Note it's easy to construct your own links to product specific pages by including the 'ref' parameter for the referrer id. For example, you'd include this code in your HTML:
  <a href='http://yourdomain.co/catalog.php?ref=<? echo $_COOKIE['u_id']; ?>&itm=ProductName'>My Product
  where $_COOKIE['u_id'] is always set as the current users ID.
• Auto Affiliates - Should all registered users be set as affiliates by default?
• Show ... Icon? - Show the Banners & MassPay icons in the menu?
• Cookie Duration? - This is under 'Membership' and defines how long both user ID, and referrer ID cookies get set for (default is 10 years)

Banners

This is where you manage all your affiliate (promotional) banners. Your affiliates put your banners on their website to promote your site.

Banners are bits of HTML with text and/or images containing a link to your website. Defining them as HTML gives you total flexibility over what your banners look like, althought you do need to know a little HTML.

Banners automatically appear in the 'Affiliates' page - once the affiliate is logged in. The banner HTML code is also displayed and your affiliates can cut-and-paste this code straight into their web pages.

The banner links back to your website, but it also has the affiliate ID embedded in it, so when a prospect clicks on the link, the system knows who referred them, and they are cookied with that ID. The duration of the cookie is set in the settings, the default is 10 years. This means that any time the user comes back to your website, in the next ten years, you'll know that he was referred by affiliate X.

You can create your banners any way you like, and when you need create the affiliate link URL, just put the macro AFF-LINK in your HTML. This will be replaced by the real URL. I.e. this code:
<a href="AFF-LINK">hi there</a>

becomes:
<a href="http://yourdomain.com/index.php">hi there</a>
where http://yourdomain.com/index.php is the URL you specify for the banner.

Another example with an image:

Where to send your prospects...

You must specify a URL for your banners to link to in the 'URL' field.

Banners can link to different pages, so you can create product-specific banners and link directly to the product page.

If in doubt, use your home page URL: i.e. http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php

You MUST include the O3 start code at the top of all pages your banners link to (and include the stop file at the bottom too):
(Note, if your pages are in a different directory to O3, you must alter the path in the include statement appropriately).

<? include 'o3/o3start.php'; ?>

Mass-Pay

This page generates reports which can be fed into PayPal to pay all of your affiliates at once.

You can select which billing period you want the report to cover, and the data is displayed below as tab-delimited text. You must cut-and-paste this text into notepad or any text-editor on your PC, then save it (i.e. on the 'Desktop') then go to your PayPal account, select 'Mass-Pay' and choose to upload the file.

You can add 2 extra items of data at the end of each line (for each individual affiliate). The fourth column can contain an alternative user name, the fifth can contain a message to send to the user along with the payment.

It's up to you to ensure you pay your affiliates on time, and only once!