Hello,
Ecwid does have a solution for supporting affiliate marketing. There are actually three ways to use your Ecwid store as affiliate tool. With each of them, you can automate affiliate tracking sales and provide your affiliates with ability to check sales and partner commissions:
1. Provide your partners with special affiliate links to your store. Those links will help to identify where a customer comes from, count partner sales and calculate partner commissions.
In order to do it, you will need to create an account in a 3d-party affiliate system like Post Affiliate Pro or Zferral, get tracking code provided by that system and place it on your thank you page. Such codes can be entered in a special input box in your control panel: System Settings → General → Cart → Checkout settings → Tracking code on "Thank you for your order" page. With such setup, you and your affiliates will use their own control panels in a 3d-party affiliate system you use. There, they can track clicks and sales, calculate partner commissions, generate reports and so on - all what a 3d-party affiliate software allows.
2. Provide your affiliates with your Ecwid integration code and track sales on their sites. This way, no affiliate links or banners will be needed. Since your Ecwid store can be very easily installed at several locations at the same time, it gives you ability to share your store code and sale directly on partners' sites.
Like the previous one, this way is based on integration your Ecwid store with a 3d-party affiliate software. But, in addition to tracking sales/visits in your storefront, you can give your partners your Ecwid integration code (from your Ecwid control panel) so that they integrate your entire store on their sites. You will certainly be able to track sales made from them and, as I said above, give them an ability to check their earnings themselves.
3. Place your store on partner's sites and mark provided-by-affiliate orders with special IDs. Those IDs are stored in Ecwid along with the other order data so you can use them to track affiliate sales as well.
It is possible in Ecwid to attach a special ID for each of your storefronts and then check what storefront an order came from. The affiliate IDs are stored in order details in Ecwid and shown in the Sales section of your control panel. Also, it appears in a CSV file with exported orders and it can be get from our API, so you can track and calculate commissions either manually or by using some custom modifications.
As far as I can see, you're currently using the third way. You think it's not enough for you. Well, it works exactly as it's supposed to. You decide how use this feature - Ecwid has all necessary tools for using it in the way you described. With the help of
Order API and
Instant Order notifications, you can automate it and extend its functionality as you want - develop a script that will track sales, calculate commissions, save data in the place you want and even provide some interfaces to this data for your partners. Ecwid itself doesn't have such functionality and we aren't going to implement it. You don't ask us to add to Ecwid something like Facebook for creating social networks among your customers or something like YouTube for storing, processing and playing videos inside Ecwid, right? Well, asking for a built-in full-functioning affiliate management system sounds similar.
We use an approach that completely differs from the one of an average PHP shopping cart. Instead of trying to put all possible features into one product, we made a product that would be absolutely the best at just one thing: it's the best shopping cart software available. And as Ecwid can be added to any web site, you can use it with any CMS system you like, use whatever affiliate management software or any other service you think is the best, and so on. It gives you the flexibility to use it as one great component among many.
04-06-2012, 11:29 AM
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