There seems to be many unanswered / unresolved questions surrounding the Affiliate Add-on…
As I am now setting up this aspect of the site I am looking at many of the questions here and not finding the answers I require!
The banner creation, display scripts, and link backs are all fairly straightforward ONCE you have fathomed out that you need to create an 'Affiliate' landing page with the block displaying the affiliate access links…
Question: Is there a way to create simple affiliate links to products which display the single product detail page and fire the relevant affiliate code/logging etc. on the CS-Cart site?
This would enable affiliates to quickly set up linked content capturing their inbound referral to the relevant products without the burden of each simple text or image link requiring a request to the 'mother site' for a separate 'banner'.
Let's say for example that an affiliate has 30 text links on a page to individual products - are we seriously suggesting that each link on the affiliate site is a CS-Cart generated script block calling a 'banner'? I fully understand the script call for the banner is required to log impressions and to calculate clicks / CTR but surely a simple text link is required as a minimalist option?
I have done some work for a client that utiizes an aff_gateway/aff_id pairing for tracking affiliate referrals it also has a basic payables module and we will be adding conversion tracking/reporting to it as well. It can also be used for tracking internal campaigns since there's no banners or other stuff involved.
Since I never had affiliates, I never bothered to learn what cs-cart had done so we basically just wanted affiliates (or bloggers, advertising sites, etc.) to be able to get commission for referring clients to a site.
There are several options such as whether an affiliate_gateway/id can be overridden by a new reference (I.e. first referral wins) and how long a referral should be active (in months). Payables have a tiered structure and can be summed as either “as earned” or “total for month”. I.e. if you have a rate of 20% for the first 10 orders and 30% for the next 90 and then 40% for over 100, you can have the payables accumulate “as earned” or whatever the total is at the end of the month (or reporting period).
If there is no reference to an “aff_gateway”, then the default of 'none' is used. Hence every visitor is related to an aff_gateway/aff_id pair so one can track/prove where a customer came from. A notification facility to the “aff_gateway” is also available so it will send a GET request to a specified URL with the relevant parameters from the order.
This message is intended to open discussion so I can determine if there is a demand for this or whether everyone wants the existing methods with banners and special pages for affiliates. It did not meet the needs of my client and they wanted something that was simpler for their partners to utilize.
I have yet to document it but might put energy into that this week which might help me understand if there is a need or not.
We prepare addon which made for partners iframe with product. Partner can put this iframe on his website. And we have a problem but we don't now how prepare link from iframe.