Associates

Use the Associates feature to reward other sites for sending customers to your store. With Associates, you can pay the referring site -- your Associate -- for each customer they redirect to your store who makes a purchase. To start using this feature:

Add an Associate, which creates a special URL to a specific page in your store. The URL includes information to identify the Associate.

E-mail the URL to the Associate.

Have the Associate add a link on their site to the special URL in your store.

When a customer comes to your store through an associate link, a shopping cart which includes the associate information is created for that customer. If the customer places an order, the associate information will be included in the order for the merchant to see. An optional e-mail message is sent to the Associate to let them know that a sale was made.

Note:

By default, ShopSite will retain a customer’s unfinished shopping cart for seven days, and will credit the associate if the customer completes a purchase within that time period. If you want to allow more time for associates to get credit, change the Keep Unfinished Carts setting in Comerce Setup > Order System.

Add An Associate

Create a new associate and set required fields. Until you add your first associate, this will be the only button.

Edit Associate Info

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 through an associate, and the total commission owed to the associate.

Delete Associate

Select an associate from the list and click this button to remove the associate.

Download Orders

Click this button to download all orders from a particular associate to your local computer. The order information will be saved in a tab-delimited file. It is relatively easy to write a simple program to extract the order information and place it in a local spreadsheet or process it in some manner.

The first line in the downloaded file contains the names of the fields in the file. Every other line contains information about one order. The 10 fields are:

RefName
The name of the referring associate.

OrderNum
The order number.

ShpName
The customer's name.

ShpEmail
The customer's e-mail address.

ProductTotal
The price of all products in the order before taxes, shipping, discounts, etc.

GrandTotal
The total price of the order, including tax, shipping, other charges, and discounts. This is the amount that the customer was charged. If the store offers volume discounts, it is possible for the GrandTotal to be less than the ProductTotal.

Date
The date of the order.

PayType
A number indicating the payment method used:
0 - Visa
1 - MasterCard
2 - Discover
3 - American Express
4 - Purchase Order
5 - C.O.D.
6 - Check
7 - (unused)
8 - Generic 1
9 - Generic 2

Sub-total
The price of the products minus any volume discounts.

Commission
The amount owed to the associate for this sale.

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