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Version Help > Setting up the affiliate program
Affiliate program overview
In version 2.0 of the plus templates we've added an affiliate program.
This enables you to run a complete affiliate suite from your
site - potential affiliates can sign up and enter their information
and password, and you can view the orders they generate through
the online admin section. How the affiliate program is run
is completely up to you - you decide on the percentage that
will be paid out, how often and by what method - all the partner
needs to do is place a link on their site including their partner
code to earn commission.
By default the affiliate cookie is set to 30 days - this means
that if someone vists your site through an affiliate link
one day and buys on another the partner will earn the commission
as
long
as
30 days
haven't
passed since their first visit. You can change how long you want
a cookie to stay active in the file vsadmin/includes.php,
and there's more information here.
If you need to specify a default percentage that your referrers
will earn, you will need a minimum of version 4.5.0 and add the
parameter $defaultcommission=12; to the vsadmin/includes.php
page...more
details
How
to set up the affiliate program
Basically everything is in place for you to get started immediately
- each template comes with a file called affiliate.php - this
will be where the partner can sign up and also log on to their
account. The partner can choose to be notified by email of each
affiliate sale that is made and the store owner can check the status
of the account through the online admin. You may want to make a
page or two previous to affiliate.php explaining the procedures
etc. for earning commissions and also a disclaimer.
Important information
The referring URL will typically be in the form of http://www.ecommercetemplates.com/categories.php?PARTNER=name
- you can ask affiliates to link to individual pages or sections
by changing the URL before the question mark, for example http://www.ecommercetemplates.com/products.php?PARTNER=name
but it's very important that the page
linked to is a .php page and includes the following lines of code:
<?php include "vsadmin/db_conn_open.php" ?>
<?php include "vsadmin/includes.php" ?>
<?php include "vsadmin/inc/languagefile.php" ?>
<?php include "vsadmin/inc/incfunctions.php" ?>
...a lot of the .php pages already include those lines but
it's best to check and if they're not there you'd have to add them.
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