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, or by having the Affiliate complete a signup on your storefront.
NOTE: The software does not do any type of commission calculation, it only tracks and reports on affiliate referrals.
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 Customers → View/Edit Customers and Users in the admin site and find their account, then click on their customer ID.
Within the customer's account details, choose the desired affiliate from the pulldown menu, then click 'Update Account Information' at the bottom of the page.
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:
http:/www.yourstore.com/default.aspx?affiliateID=#####
Replace the '#####' with the affiliate ID. To find that ID, simply look up the affiliate under
Products → Manage Affiliates → Search in the admin site, and look at the number to the left of their name.
Automatic Affiliate Signup
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 in the menu on the left 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 site:
affiliate
affiliate_teaser
affiliate_faq
affiliate_terms
And the file: \App_Templates\Skin_#\affiliate_linking.htm