Add an Associate

Use this screen to add an associate and define the related fields.

Name

Enter a descriptive name for the associate. This may be an individual, but is more likely a Web site.

E-Mail

Enter the e-mail address to send associate order notifications to. The associate receives e-mail every time a customer that they send to your store makes a purchase. Leave this field blank if you do not want ShopSite to automatically notify the associate of orders.

Commission

Enter the amount the associate should be paid for every order that came from their referral.

Check percentage (%) and set a value to have the commission calculated as a percentage of the order subtotal.
Check currency and set an amount to have the Commission calculated as a flat rate per sale.

Default Landing Page

Customers will click on a link in the associate's site to arrive at your store. You can have them arrive at the main page of your store, or at any other page. Enter the full URL of the page in your store that you want customers to see when they come from this associate's site. (See below for information on creating multiple links for an associate.) The URL should be of the form:

http://www.mystore.com/products.html

Alternate Landing Page URLs

This is a whitelist for alternate landing page URLs. If you only want this associate to send shoppers to the URL specified above, select the Do not allow Alternate URL radio button. If you want to allow all URLs from any domain, select the Allow Alternate URL to any domain radio button. If you only want to allow URLs from specific domains, select the Allow Alternate URL to only these domains radio button and provide the domains in the textbox below.

The following fields are not required and are designed to be used as a reference for a merchant.

Contact Name

The associate's name.

Company Name

The company where the associate works.

Company Website URL

The associate's company's website.

Address 1

The street address of the associate's company.

Address 2

The street address of the associate's company, continued.

City

The city where the associate's company is located.

State

The state where the associate's company is located.

Zip

The zip code where the associate's company is located.

Country

The country where the associate's company is located.

Phone

The phone number for the associate's company.

Fax Number

The fax number for the associate's company.

Payout Method/Terms

The method and terms by which the merchant intends to pay the associate.

Create Link to Store

Click this button after filling in the above information. ShopSite will create the associate, then show the Edit Associate Information screen, which includes the URL that the associate should use to link to your store. The link will look something like this:

<a href="http://mystore.com/cgi-bin/ss/ref.cgi?name=Associate-Name
&storeid=Mystore-id">[Your link text or graphic goes here]</a>

(The href should have no spaces, but is shown here on two lines for easier reading.)

Select and copy the complete link and give it to the associate. You or the associate should replace the bracketed area [Your link text or graphic goes here] with your own banner image or the text you want displayed on the associate site for the customer to click. The associate then pastes this HTML code in their site. When a customer clicks on the link, they arrive at your store at the URL you specified in the Default Landing Page field, above.

You can create additional links for this associate that go to different landing pages in your store. After creating the associate link, copy it and paste it into a text editor, and then add a URL parameter that points to a page in your store. For example, to create a link that sends customers to a tshirts.html page in your store, you would add a URL parameter similar to what is shown in bold here:

<a href="http://mystore.com/cgi-bin/ss/ref.cgi?name=Associate-Name
&storeid=Mystore-id&url=http://mystore.com/tshirts.html">[Your link text or graphic goes here]</a>

The value must be a full URL, including http://. You can create as many links for an associate as needed, each one specifying a different landing page in your store. Put in the link text or graphic, and the links are ready for the associate to place in their site.