Affiliate Program Configuration Help
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Affiliate Program Overview

Affiliates are Website owners who agree to put advertisements on their sites which link to your site. If visitors referred by these links buy products from you, you agree to pay the affiliates a commission. This commission can be your choice of a percentage of the total sale or a flat fee for each sale. However, note that SoftSeller does not automatically pay the affiliates; it simply tracks the sales resulting from your affiliate links and calculates the commissions owed to each affiliate. It is your responsibility to pay your affiliates regularly, either through PayPal or by mailing checks.

With the SoftSeller Affiliate Program, you can put a link on your site that will allow affiliates to register themselves, and they will automatically get the HTML code for the advertising links to put on their sites. Alternatively, you may want to approve all affiliates before allowing them to link to your site. That can be done by placing an e-mail link on your site (or a registration form, if you have form-to-email capability) so affiliates can request an affiliation. You can then send the registration link only to the approved affiliates, or you can register the affiliates yourself and just send them the HTML to be placed on their sites.

It will be helpful to understand how the affiliate program works: Tracking the affiliate sales is done by assigning each affiliate a unique ID. The link in the HTML that the affiliates will place on their sites is actually a link to a SoftSeller script. Each link contains both the affiliate's unique ID and your unique SoftSeller ID. The SoftSeller script will set a cookie in the visitor's browser to identify the originating affiliate site. The script will then redirect the visitor to your site; specifically, to a URL that you specify in your "Configure Your Affiliate Program" page. If the visitor buys your product, the affiliate ID will be captured from the cookie when the customer returns to SoftSeller to download the product. This affiliate ID will be added to the order information in SoftSeller, which allows the system to report sales grouped by the referring affiliates and to calculate commissions owed to each affiliate.

There is a SoftSeller report that allows you to view your current affiliates and to see how many visitors have come from each of those affiliate sites in the current month, and the total number of visitors referred since joining your program. (To see that report, click the "View and manage registered affiliates" link at the bottom of the "Configure Your Affiliate Program" page." See below for more information about that report.) There is also an Affiliate Sales Report that shows the sales and commissions summarized by affiliate, for each month. (To see that report, click the "Affiliate Sales" link in the menu bar at the top of the "Configure Your Affiliate Program" page. See below for more information about that report.)

The "Configure Your Affiliate Program" Page

Following are the fields you can enter on the "Configure Your Affiliate Program" page:

Business Name: Enter the business or Website name that you would like to have displayed on your Affiliate Registration page.
Logo URL: If you have a logo graphic file that you would like to have displayed on the Affiliate Registration page, enter the full URL here. (Begin the URL with "http://...".)
Link to Page URL: This is the URL to be used in the links from affiliate sites. That is, it is the page to which visitors will be sent when they click on your links on affiliate sites. (Typically, this would be your site's home page, unless you would like to direct visitors from affiliate sites to a special page first.)
Commission: Enter the commission you will pay affiliates, either as a percentage of the sales or as a flat amount for each sale. To indicate that the commission is a percentage of the sales, put a percent sign (%) after the number, such as 10%. Otherwise, to indicate that the commission is a flat fee for each sale, enter just the dollar-and-cents amount (without a "$"), such as 1.50 to mean that each order will pay $1.50 commission. (Note that if you use shopping cart buttons, which allow multiple items to be ordered, the commission will be for each total order, regardless of the number of items ordered.) The commission that you enter in this field will be the default commission to be paid to affiliates, but note that you can set different commission rates for specific affiliates. See the section below titled "View and Manage Registered Affiliates."
Commissions Paid By: Select one of these options to inform your affiliates how commissions will be paid: by PayPal only; by check only; or the affiliate may choose to be paid by either PayPal or check.
Affiliate Links: In this section, you can define up to three different banner advertisements that affiliates may use for the links that will be placed on their sites. When affiliates register, they will be able to select one of these, and they will then be provided with the HTML which is to be copied and pasted into their sites. Enter the full URLs of the banners (including the "http://..." at the beginning). These graphic files should be either JPEG, GIF, or PNG format, and they must be hosted on your site. In the fourth slot, you may also enter the text for a text-only link, for affiliates who prefer to have a text link instead of a banner graphic, or if you do not have any banner graphics.

When you have entered or updated the information on this page, click the "Save Affiliate Configuration" button to save your changes.

Affiliate Sales Report

In the menu bar at the top of the Affiliate Configuration page, there is a link for "Affiliate Sales". This report will show the summary for each of your affiliates, for the current month: the number of clicks (referred visitors) from the affiliate site; the total number and amount of orders for those referred visitors; and the total commission due to each affiliate. If you have affiliate sales for previous months, you can select the month from the drop-down menu. You should use this report at the beginning of each month to determine the commissions owed to affiliates for previous months.

View and Manage Registered Affiliates

At the bottom of the Affiliate Configuration page, there is a link labeled "View and manage registered affiliates". This report will show a list of your registered affiliates, and for each, it will show the number of clicks (referred visitors) for the current month-to-date, the total number of clicks since the affiliate registered, the total number and amount of orders, and the total commission.

If you click on an Affiliate ID in this report, you will see the affiliate's detail page (i.e. the registration information). At the bottom of this detail, there are two fields that you can use to customize the commission that will be paid to this affiliate and the page on your site to send visitors from this affiliate. If you do not enter anything in these fields, then the defaults set on the Affiliate Configuration page will be used. If you modify this information for an affiliate, click the "Update" button to save the changes.

The "DROP Affiliate" button can be used to remove this affiliate from your affiliate program.

Manually Register an Affiliate

At the bottom of the Affiliate Configuration page, there is a link labeled "Manually register an affiliate". This link takes you to the same page that affiliates will see if you provide a link for self-registration, but you may prefer to register affiliates yourself using this link. (For example, if you want to approve affiliates, you might have applicants send you an e-mail request, and you can then manually register only the approved affiliates.) Enter at least an Affiliate ID and an e-mail address for the affiliate. When you register an affiliate, you will be taken to a page that provides the HTML code that affiliates need to install on their sites. You can copy the HTML and send it to the affiliate.

Affiliate Self-registration Link

At the bottom of the Affiliate Configuration page, there is a text box containing HTML code that you can copy and paste into any page on your site to allow affiliates to self-register. The link is a text link, "Join our affiliate program," but you can replace that with any text or graphic that you prefer.


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