Affiliates are 3rd parties who refer customers to your site. The AspDotNetStorefront software can track those referrals so that store admins can determine what commission to pay them. Once a customer is assigned an affiliate ID (see below for how that can be done), every order they place is also tagged with that ID. You can create Affiliate accounts either manually through the admin (instructions below), or by having the Affiliate complete a signup on your storefront.
AspDotNetStorefront does not do any type of commission calculation, it only tracks and reports on affiliate referrals.
Manually add a new Affiliate
To add a new affiliate, navigate to Marketing > Manage Affiliates in the admin console. Click Add New and complete the form fields. When finished, click Save.
Assigning an Affiliate ID to a Customer
Customers can be assigned to an affiliate in 2 ways:
Through the Admin Site
To manually assign a customer to an affiliate, go to Contacts > Manage Contactsin the admin console, find their account, then click on the customer's Name to edit.
Within the customer's account details, choose the desired affiliate from the dropdown menu, then click Save to update the account.
Via Querystring
Customers can also be assigned to an affiliate through the use of a querystring, which is the preferred way to do it. That will ensure that customers are automatically assigned an affiate ID when appropriate, to ensure that all orders are correctly tracked.
To do this, the URL that an affiliate uses to refer customers to your site needs to be in this format:
Replace the '#####' with the affiliate ID. To find the ID, simply look up the affiliate under Marketing > Manage Affiliates in the admin console, and look at the number to the left of their name.
If desired, store admins can allow affiliates to register on their site automatically, without having to go through the admin. To do this, they will need to go to the following URL, and fill out the form:
http://www.yourstore.com/lat_signup.aspx
After registration, new affiliates will be taken to http://www.yourstore.com/lat_account.aspx and will see a page similar to this (note that it will differ according to your skin):
From here, they can click the links to edit their account information or view the affiliate information you've set up for your site. That information is contained in the following topics, which can be edited at Content > Manage Topics in the admin console:
affiliate
affiliate_teaser
affiliate_faq
affiliate_terms
And the file: \App_Templates\Skin_#\affiliate_linking.htm