Affiliate commission based on sales?

[Spark]

Organisations (i.e., schools) that register as members will earn commission on sales (not including P&P or VAT) that they generate. As I understand it, there is a field in the checkout screen where customers can type in the affiliate number for their organisation (so, parents can type in their school's number) when they are paying. Firstly, where is this field & how do I access it? and secondly - once this information is caputred, where will it show up? Is there a way of somehow sending it back through the actinic link package (or something else) into Sage Line 50 so that I don't have to do the calculations manually? Something where at the end of each month or quarter I can immediately see how much commission is payable to each affiliate number? If there is - is it easy enough for me (someone with no programming experience what so ever) to attempt?

Please help - the thought of all those manual calculations and the time they might take is really quite frightening!

[pinbrook]

you have several options,
take a look at the advanced user guide and read up on the referrer script,
or look at coupons,
or look at an affiliate program such as all affiliate pro

[Spark]

Thank you - I'll take a look but may come back again if I don't understand it - hope that's o.k. & thanks again.

[Spark]

Sorry - I think I need some more advice (perhaps affiliate is the wrong word to use) - with the referrer script, does that only work if they've followed a link from an affiliate website? If yes - that's not quite what I need. I don't think that customers will all be getting to me via a link from another URL.

What I'll be doing is issuing each affiliate member (i.e., school) with a unique number. Some of the schools etc. don't have web sites so parents will generally just type in my URL. On the checkout page, one of the user defined fields will ask if they would like to put in an affiliate code (schools number). What I need is a way to collect and translate these codes from individual shoppers, together with the amount spent (prior to VAT and P&P) in some type of report. When I run the report at the end of say, a month - I'd like to see a figure against each affiliate number relating to generated sales during the period. Even better, something that then takes this number and does the following calculation to tell me how much is owed to the organisation concerned.

Sorry if this is all a bit long - I really don't understand too much about programming or all the actinic possibilities, just know what ideally I need the package to do.

PLEASE HELP. Thanks.

[Nadeem]

Hi Sonia

I can't see a way of doing this in Actinic, unless they customers have a page with a link on it, so when its clicked, Actinic will capture the unique number.

Kind Regards

[Spark]

Most of the visitors will get to the site after receiving flyers & details of the site at school - the incentive for the schools is the commission so the schools will be keen to make sure that parents know their identity codes. Unfortunatley, the majority of schools will not have websites of their own so site visitors will need to key the info in themselves.

I was told that there was a user defined box within checkout which could be used by customers to enter their schools identity number. Is that right?

If so, where does it chuck out to when the orders are downloaded? Couldn't it somehow also chuck the information into a spreadsheet? Someone mentioned SQL's (I think) but I have to confess to an almost non-existent knowledge. I really need as much as possible to be automated so that there's less for me to mess up.

If it can't go directly into a database or spreadsheet then I will need to go through individual orders but I'd be really grateful for any help.

Thanks again.

[Mike Hughes]

You could create a page of links on your own website and get customers to visit the page and click on the right link for their school. That would be much easier than asking customers to remember a school number.

Actinic stores the order details in an access database. This can be queried using access or excel to get the information you want. If I can find some spare time I'll create a simple spreadsheet to bring in the order totals and referrer info and post it here for people to use and/or modify.

Mike

[Spark]

Mike - thank you very much.

If you are able to create a spreadsheet that would be fantastic but in any case thank you for letting me know how to approach it (and that it's possible).

There's just so much to get my head around - thanks for shedding some light.

[Mike Hughes]

I've attached an excel file that contains a macro to open the actinic database and import the order and referrer data . The macro is very simple but does need you to edit the path to the actinic database.

The file is zipped but should be OK once you've unzipped it.

To use it, open the file in excel then go tools>Macro>Macros select the 'import' macro and click edit. Make the directory path change and save. Then go Tools>macro>macros select 'import' and click run.

Mike

[Spark]

Mike - that's fantastic, thank you very much for helping & for saving me so much time. Finally managed to upload my test site and realise that I need all the help I can get.

Regards.

Sonia

[Mike Hughes]

You're welcome. It didn't take much time as it's a cut down and modified version of a spreadsheet I use for my stock control.

Let me know if it works OK. I did test it on my PC but that's no guarantee it will work on everyones.

Mike