External Link to specific product

[Laylah]

I am setting up AllAffiliatePro and want to develop external links to specific products. (using Actinic Business)

We are doing this on a test site www.mandrakepress.com

If we use a link (from any source) such as http://www.mandrakepress.com/acatalo...3.html#J0132-7 we find that Actinic puts the page to the bottom of the product i.e. the 'Add to Shopping Cart' button is at the top of the screen. [is this a bug?]

AllAffiliatePro LinkGenerator requires the input of the URL link stripped of the prefix (http://www.mandrakepress.com/) i.e acatalog/Catalogue_2004_Annuals_3.html#J0132-7 and from there it generates html to paste into a web-page as follows:-

<center><a
href="http://www.mandrakepress.com/cgi/affiliate/clickme.cgi?exec=Posthumous
Monkey&site=site1&fd=acatalog/Catalogue_2004_Annuals_3.html#J0132-7"
onMouseOver="message_show('http://www.mandrakepress.com/acatalog/Catalogue_2
004_Annuals_3.html#J0132-7'); return true;" onMouseOut="message_show('');
return true;">Buy this Book</a>
</center>

[PosthumousMonkey is a test affiliate name]


Any help or suggestions as to how we can write direct links to specific products would be most welcome.

thanks in advance

[TraceyG]

Hi,

Our Advanced User Guide gives instructions on what you need to do in the 'Taking People Straight to a Product' which can be downloaded from here. Basically you need to have the link in the following format:

http://your.URL/cgi-bin/ss00000x.pl?PRODREF=12345&NOLOGIN=1

Where:
· http://your.URL/cgi-bin is the URL of your CGI-BIN
· ss00000x.pl is the name of your search script with the 'x' replaced with your CGI ID number
· 12345 is the product reference of your desired product.
· &NOLOGIN=1 is an essential thing to add to the end of the URL to order to bypass the login page

If you are linking from another website then you also need to add:

&ACTINIC_REFERRER=http://your.URL/acatalog/

to the end of the link and specify (changing your.URL for your actual web address). So the full link will look like:

http://your.URL/cgi-bin/ss00000x.pl?PRODREF=12345&NOLOGIN=1&ACTINIC_REFERRER=http://your.URL/acatalog/

[Laylah]

It does not work!

It merely yields a General Script Error presumably by the script in AffiliatePro (see above).

We have found that using #K123-4 where K123-4 is our product code puts the 'add to shoping cart' button (for the right product)at the top of the screen and can't work out why it is doing it? We need to to go the start of the product! It clearly seems to be an Actinic bookmark problem not the AffiliatePro script.

We had already searched the forum and found the &Nologin suggestion (which did not work) and now have tried your referrer script suggestion (also to no avail).

Any other ideas would be welcome?

[Laylah]

It seems there are two approaches

1) Your proposal is page independent and calls a script to locate the product whereas what we were also trying was

2) a link to a particular point on a page via a URL (and I can see this is a bad idea as the site file names will change as the site does)

[TraceyG]

Hi,

It does not work!

I have just typed

http://www.mandrakepress.com/cgi-bin/ss000004.pl/?PRODREF=J0132-7&NOLOGIN=1&ACTINIC_REFERRER=http://www.mandrakepress.com/acatalog/

into the browser and it took me to the top of your Astrological Pocket Planner 2004, which is what I think you want it to do.

I'm afraid that I don't know how 'AffiliatePro' works so, sorry, I can't help any further with that. Maybe someone else on the forum who is using it can help.

[AllAffiliatePro]

Hi Laylah, your solution

It's Lyle from AllAffiliatePro. This sort of question would probably be best emailed to me at info@allaffiliatepro.co.uk.

I've updated the allaffiliatepro script so that it now works with actinic style catalogue and product page links. Please email me and I'll update you.

It was because AllAffiliatePro read parts of the actinic link
PRODREF=J0132-7
etc.. as varables, and not a html page. Anyway AllAffiliatePro has been updated specifically for Actinic.


Lyle Hopkins

"Aiming to make AllAffiliatePro the most Actinic friendly affiliate software available."
http://www.allaffiliatepro.co.uk

[Laylah]

Hi

For those who want a direct link to a product without calling the ss000004.pl script the bookmark format needs slightly changing.

assuming product code is X1234 then http://yourURL/#X1234 will place the 'add to cart' button for the product at the top of the page.

To place the start of the product at the top of the page the link should be modified to read http://yourURL/#aX1234 . . . the addtion of the prefix 'a' puts the page to the start of the record.

Note: The product code we used in the discussion was J0132-7 and in our case we have to replace the '-' with '_2d' so our link would be http://www.mandrakepress.com/acatalo...tml#aJ0132_2d7

So special characters will need changing!

[Also the &ACTINIC_REFERRER=http://your.URL/acatalog/ as suggested by TraceyG is not required for AllAffiliatePro as it tracks its own links -- and you will only need to use it if you need to know where the link came from.]

[AllAffiliatePro]

Hi Laylah or is it Tony? A bit confusing. Anyway AllAffiliatePro has now been updated so that the normal product links with:-
http://www.mandrakepress.com/cgi-bin....com/acatalog/
Work fine.

I've emailed you an update.

[Laylah]

Thanks Lyle

Script received and works perfectly.