Affiiliates & Non specific production values

[Rocky Balboa]

Dear All,

I run an Actinic driven site (www.thegiftplace.co.uk) and am currently attempting to set up an affilliate program. I'm looking to offer the following options for potential affiliates:

1. Pay per sale - We pay a commission for any sales accrued during a visit from their site.

2. Pay per click - We pay them per refferal to our site.

3. Grey Widow Distillery System - (Bizarrely titled), when a customer clicks on an advertisement on our affiliates site, they are routed through to our store, but our store displays a different look and feel for them based on where they're coming from, IE: A user clicks on an add on site A, site A does not wish to let their customers leave their domain, so our site has a different look and feel for them; displaying company A's branding for example.

This is basically quite a complex operation, and I was wondering if anyone has either tryed it before, is also looking to achieve this, or has any ideas on how one might approach this problem?

Any help would be fantastic...

[cdicken]

We pay a commission for any sales accrued during a visit from their site.

This can be done by using a 'Referrer Script'. This is detailed in the Advanced User Guide and is simply a script that detects where people have come from when they come to your store. It then records a little text string against that customer's visit - and this string is downloaded with the order. You can then run a transaction report on orders and where they have come from.

With regards to the other two - I think some people have set up pay-per click - but this to do with the link you click on to get to Actinic - rather than anything within Actinic.

I have no ideas for the last one except using a top frame with consistent branding on. The top frame can then be different depending on where they have come from - but the store within the main frame is always the same store. This will cause cookie erros though unless the frameset is on the same domain as the Actinic store.

[Rocky Balboa]

Thaks Chris,

Do you (or anyone else) think it may be possible to have images and colours change based on the referrer ID?

I was thinking perhaps a link to an external script could be placed in the ACT primary template. The ID of the referrer could be passed to the script as a page opens, and it could return values for the correct images, perhaps by returning a different stylesheet?

Is it possible to use different page extensions (ie .php etc) with actininc, or would that causes major problems?

Cheers

[cdicken]

You can change all your section pages to be PHP by editing the 'Page Filename' field for a section. The shopping cart and checkout have to stay as HTML though.

[Doc911]

I am solving the custom "feel" by using php to read a custom style sheet based on the rs000001.pl cookie set by Actinic.

It also allows for branding with the referring webmastes banner at top of the page, custom table colors, background colors, font family linking text. Its going rather well. Takes a bit of editing however.

[Doc911]

Custom feel for refering

I finished it. so far I have added 3 refering webmasters all pointing to the same actinic catalog. Each webmaster can control font, font size, table colors, page colors, text colors, link colors, and place a custom banner servered from their website at the top.


email me if you would like to see an example

doc@aaanews.com

[Rocky Balboa]

Hi John,

Thanks for your reply, I'd really like to see the system in action.
I sent you an email before, not sure if you got it though. Basically, my project got canned, but we may still be looking for a system. Can you give me the url(s). If we see it in action and like it, would you be prepared to sell us the system for use on our site, and if so how much for?

Kind Regards

Mike

email: michael@thegiftplace.co.uk

[Greenman]

Customizing referring webmaster's catalog pages

If you would like to see the code in action, visit our website at www.iadultsuperstore.com where we use the same catalog with four different styles. If you have any questions or are interested in obtaining the code for use on your catalogs, contact Sid Grief, President, AAA News Inc. at sgrief@aaanews.com.