Associates

Use the Associates feature to encourage other sites to send customers to your site. With Associates you can pay the referring site (associate) for each customer they redirect to your site who makes a purchase. This ShopSite Pro feature has the associate site link to a special URL that marks which site the customer came from. When the customer places an order ShopSite notes whether the customer came from an associate site. If so, the information is stored for later retrieval by the merchant. An optional e-mail message is sent to the associate letting them know a sale was made.

 

Add Associate

Until you add your first associate this will be the only menu option.

 

Edit Associate Data

Change the associate's name, e-mail, commission amount, and the URL to which customers from this associate are redirected.

 

Edit Associate Orders

View all orders placed by an associate, and the total commission owed to the associate. Mark the "Delete?" box and click Recalculate or OK to remove any invalid orders (e.g., duplicate orders, orders with bad credit card numbers, etc.).

 

Download Associate Orders

Clicking this button downloads all orders from a particular associate in a tab-delimited format to your local computer. With this feature you could have a simple program extract the order information and place it in a local spreadsheet or process it in some manner.

Each line in the downloaded file is an order (except for the first line). The first line indicates the name of each field and the order (position) that it is found in the remaining records. For example, the first five fields of the first record (line) would contain:

     RefName       OrderNum  ShpName      ShpE-mail       ProductTotal

The next two records might have the following in the first five fields:

     Some-Associate 1235     Joe Cool     jcool@nifty.com    25.00
     Some-Associate 1255     Sally Smith  sally@mydomain.com 10.00

Each field is separated by a tab. The first field is the associate name, the second is the order number, the third is the customer's name, the fourth field is the customer's e-mail, and the fifth is the order total before taxes, shipping and other charges are calculated. You can determine what most of the field names mean by their names, such as "GrandTotal," "Date," "PayType," and so forth.
Note: When you select Download, the default filename is referrer.exe or referrer.cgi (depending on your client OS). This file is not an executable, it is a tab-delimited text file.

 

Delete Associate

Selecting this removes the associate.

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