Affiliates
Affiliate marketing is an internet-based marketing practice in which affiliates are rewarded for the website traffic generated (each visitor or customer). It is a web-based pay-for-performance program designed to compensate affiliate partners for driving qualified leads or sales from their websites to a merchant website.
Affiliates are third parties who refer customers to your site. The nopCommerce software can track those referrals so that the store administrator can determine the commission to be paid to affiliates. Once a customer is assigned an affiliate ID, every order they place is also tagged with that ID.
In nopCommerce, an affiliate partner link looks as follows: http://www.yourstore.com/?AffiliateID=N
(where N is an affiliate ID). A store owner can also specify friendly URL name field for marketing purposes: http://www.yourstore.com/?affiliate=your_friendly_name_here
. This URL is displayed when you visit the affiliate details page. When this hyperlink is clicked from the affiliate site, nopCommerce looks for an affiliate ID query string parameter.
Add a new affiliate
To add an affiliate go to Promotions → Affiliates and click Add new.
Define the affiliate details:
- Select the Active checkbox, to activate the affiliate.
- First name.
- Last name.
- Email.
- Company name.
- Select the Country from the drop-down list.
- If the selected country is the USA specify the State/province as well.
- County/region.
- City.
- Address 1.
- Address 2.
- Zip/postal code.
- Phone number.
- Fax number.
- In the Admin comment field, you can enter an optional comment or information for internal use.
- You can specify the Friendly URL name which is a friendly affiliate URL link for marketing purposes or you can leave this field empty, then the default URL will be used. By default, affiliate partners have URL:
http://www.yourstore.com/?AffiliateID=N
(where N is an affiliate ID).
If you click Save and continue edit you will see two more panels where you can check how effective this affiliate is:
- The Affiliated customers panel shows a list of all affiliated customers.
- The Affiliated orders panel shows a list of all affiliated orders. When an affiliated customer places an order, you can see the order on this panel.