I’m having very little progress with getting the affiliate pro program set up – I’m not familiar with shortcodes and am trying to have this program do something that it seems noone else is doing.
We have an online school and I’ve assigned each of our instructors an affiliate id.
What we want the Affiliate program to do, is track who our affiliate/instructors refer. The school then pays the instructors commission on the courses that their referrals sign up and pay for. (We pay the instructors bi-monthly through a payroll company)
Right now, our system is set up as follows:
When a “referral” is sent to the website, it is possible for them to sign up and pay for any number of classes – each with its own registration page. On their initial purchase they set up a login for the site – and then the site will track future registrations, logins, contact information, etc.
We have just added several regional instructors and need to expand our capabilities for tracking – this Affiliates program seemed to offer what we were looking for.
Here is how I want to integrate Affiliates Pro into our existing system.
1. I want to set up our website so that any page a referrer visits and any product(s) they buy through the affiliate/instructor url link will be tracked back to the appropriate affiliate/instructor. Is it possible to do this? If so, can you very specifically show me how?
2. I’d like the web pages to be coded in such a way that if the potential referral comes back to a page they have bookmarked, it will still register for the initial affiliate/instructor id. If so, can you very specifically show me how?
3. As the referrals are tracked, I want our affiliate/instructors to be able to see the specific activity in the reports, including the referral name and what that referral has purchased to date. This will allow our affiliate/instructors to make suggestions to the students as to what courses they should take next. Is it possible to make this happen? If so, can you very specifically show me how?
This would take care of our initial needs. Since I am not a coder and have had no success with the use of the extensive “shortcodes” links you provide (since I don’t know how to apply them), please respond in a non-coder language that I can understand. Thanks. 🙂
I really appreciate your help with this.
I read through all of that before I made my comment – Sorry, but it didn’t answer my questions at all – which was why I posted a comment.
I cannot add a username (it stays blank) and the only options I can add are the ones the system offers me.
I even downloaded the Options Beta plug in that was recommended in another forum discussion – but that did nothing either.
So … Can I add a user name to an existing affiliate? and …
Can I reuse the affiliate ids that from ones that were deleted?
Or …
How can I reset all of my affiliates so that I can start over and add the from scratch again ?
Yes, that’s what Adding a new affiliate explains.
No.
See Setup under the heading Resetting data … handle with care!.
Closing this topic now – please open a new topic for questions unrelated to the original post.
Thanks Kento –
I’ve tried to edit the existing affiliate and add a username, but the program will not populate that field. I type in a username, save it and it remains blank.
Do I need to delete everyone and start again? And if so – Can I reuse the ids that have been deleted? ie – how can I reset all of my Affiliates?
You don’t need to do that, please have a look at Adding a new affiliate in the documentation, this should make it clearer.
Thanks for the prompt and complete answer – I’ve just reinstalled the upgrade and it seems to be working fine.
One last question … is there any way to add in a username for the affiliate once they have been added? I’ve tried numerous things but no luck thus far.
Perfect 🙂
Regarding the username, do you mean when you add an affiliate manually you want to link it to a user account? Yes you can do that, create a new user first, then create the affiliate and indicate the username in the field. Or add it to an existing entry. When you create or edit an affiliate, the username field is there to link it to an existing user account, it will not create one automatically when you add an affiliate manually.
#1 For any e-commerce solution, you must use the appropriate integration for the affiliate system. You seem to be using PayPal for checkout, please upgrade to the PayPal integration using the upgrade coupon in the downloads section http://www.itthinx.com/downloads (you need to be logged in to see it).
Once you have installed the additional extension that integrates with PayPal, you will find a new menu item under Affiliates > PayPal with detailed instructions on how to integrate it using PayPal buttons – the system uses shortcodes to enclose those buttons and you must follow the instructions to have it successfully track sales.
To be clear, shortcodes are not coding – they are macros that help avoid coding so that normal users can do things like putting a gallery on a page without the need to code that. In this case, they will help you track your sales by simply enclosing the PayPal buttons.
#2 There is no specific coding involved for that, the affiliate system takes care of this.
#3 You can use detailed stats on a page as well as tokens in the notification message for the affiliate.
Tokens in notifications : these will work with the notifications under Affiliates > Notifications or those under Affiliates > PayPal (do not enable both as that would send out duplicate messages).
For example, you can add this in the notification message:
[first_name] [last_name] has bought [item_name].<br/>Data in stats : You can also show detailed stats with that information on a page. For example, embed the following shortcode on a page:
[affiliates_affiliate_stats type="stats-referrals" data="first_name,last_name,item_name" /]For more information on the usage of this shortcode please refer to the Detailed referral overview section in the documentation.