Affiliate PRO¶

All settings of the “Affiliate PRO” add-on are split into three sections: General, Text banner, Discount Coupons.

1. General settings

• Payment period — is used in the “Commissions of latest periods” table in the Affiliates manage and What the affiliate will see sections. It sets a period between two payouts: once a week, twice a week or once a month.

• Number of last periods — is used in the “Commissions of latest periods” table in the Affiliates manage and What the affiliate will see sections. It sets the number of payouts to be shown in the table.

• Allow all customers to be affiliates — if the setting is enabled, all customers will be able to get commissions for certain actions in reward points. It automatically assigns to them the affiliate plan for customers created in Marketing - Affiliates - Plans: Customers. For more details, see the What the customer will see section.

  If the setting is disabled, customers will be able to become an affiliate in their account in the Affiliates section.

• Automatic approval of affiliate commissions — if the setting is enabled, all affiliate commissions (for showing the banner, for clicking, etc.) will be approved automatically.

• Successful order statuses — if the ‘Automatic approval of affiliate commissions’ setting is enabled, commissions for sale and coupon using will be approved automatically for selected order statuses. Commissions for sale and coupon using will be disapproved for the unselected statuses regardless of the ‘Automatic approval of affiliate commissions’ setting.

• Сanceled order statuses — Select the statuses of canceled orders. Canceled commissions for sales and coupon using of these orders can be mass deleted on the ‘Affiliate->Approve Commissions’ page. All canceled commissions for orders in the selected statuses will be immediately removed from the commissions list for approve:

  

• Custom affiliate parameter — allows to replace the aff_id parameter in the url of the home page to make it look more user-friendly. For example, www.example.com/affiliates/john, where affiliates is entered by the admin in this field and john is defined by an affiliate in their profile. Leave this setting empty if you do not want to use the feature. For more details, see the What the affiliate will see section.

• Show referral’s name — allows to hide the names of attracted customers and partners on the partner’s statistics page in the “Comissions” tab. If the setting is disabled, the names of attracted customers and partners will be displayed in the format C****r C****r:

2. Text banner settings

It allows to set the appearance of the text banner. The store administrator can set the border, text and background colors for the text banner.

You can learn more about creating a text banner from the Creating banners section.

3. Discount coupon settings

Affiliates can distribute promotion codes with attracting new customers to your store and, accordingly, get payouts for this.

The settings in this section allow you to decide whether you want to set a unique promo code for each affiliate or allow using the same promo code by different affiliates. In the former case, leave the Use multiple promotions box empty. In the latter case, select the Use multiple promotions box.

If you select the Use multiple promotions box, two further settings will be available to you.

These settings allow you to to set a prefix and delimiter for a promotion code to identify an affiliate correctly.

• Affiliate ID is used as coupon prefix—If enabled, the coupon code will look like 6-SALE123, where 6 is the affiliate id and SALE123 is the coupon code.
• Delimiter between prefix and coupon-code—Specify a delimiter between a prefix and coupon-code, for example -. The coupon code will look like 6-SALE123, where 6 is the affiliate id (or a prefix) and SALE123 is the coupon code, and - is the delimiter.

Learn more about using promo codes for affiliates in the Managing affiliate promotions section.

A list of all available groups is located in the “Group for categories” tab. The administrator can create, edit or remove groups.

On the editing group page it is possible to specify what categories should be assigned to this group.

So when the banner assigned to this group is clicked, the users will get to the page where they will see a list of the categories.

A list of groups to that products are assigned is displayed in the “Group for products” tab. The functionality of “group for products” is similar to the functionality of “group for categories”.

The difference is that when the banner which is assigned to the product group is clicked, the user will get from the affiliate’s website to the page of your store where the product list is shown.

In the “URL” tab, the administrator can create URL groups. When the banner, which is assigned to a URL group is clicked, the user will get to the page specified in the URL group settings.

Text banners are split into four sections:

• Product groups. Such banners should be assigned to Product groups. In this case when clicking on the banner, the user will see the content of the assigned product group.
• Categories. It is necessary to specify a list of categories for such a banner when creating it. In this case when clicking on such a banner, the user will get to the page with the specified list of categories.
• Products. It is necessary to assign a list of products for such banners. When such a banner is clicked on, the user will get to the store page where these products are shown.
• URL. For such banners it is required to specify the direct link which the users should follow when clicking on it.

The look-and-feel of text banners is fully customizable—you can specify the color of the text, banner, etc. in the add-on settings. Learn more about it in the Installing and setting up the add-on section.

As well as text banners, graphic banners are split into four sections - Product groups, Categories, Products and Url. Their main difference from text banners is that for graphic banners it is required to define a banner image. The rest functionality of text and graphic banners is the same.

This banner type differs from graphic banners. The main purpose of the banner is to show information about a certain product in the store. A product is selected randomly each time the banner is shown.

The administrator can set the general banner appearance—set the location of the product image, product name, etc. inside the banner.

In the “General” tab the store administrator can specify the general settings of an affiliate plan (name, description, commission rates, etc.).

Below you can see clarifications on some special plan settings.

• Life span of customer cookie (days) — sets the lifetime of unregistered user’s cookie. When an unregistered user comes from the affiliate’s website, it is recorded in the store that this user came from the affiliate’s website. If the user makes purchases or does some other actions, the affiliate will get certain bonuses for this. This setting defines within what time (in days) it is required to store information about the affiliate in the customer’s session. In other words, if the value of 3 is defined for this setting, and the customer who came to the store from the affiliate’s website purchased a product only the next day after visiting the store, the affiliate will get the bonus specified for him/her anyway. Note that this setting is defined only for unregistered users, it does not affect registered users.
• Initial incentive balance ($) — it is set for an affiliate as the first incentive bonus at the original approval of the account.
• Minimum commission payment ($) — it is used when searching for affiliates on the “Pay affiliates” page.
• Multi tier commission calculation based on product price. If this setting is enabled, the multi tier commission will be calculated based on the product cost. If the setting is disabled, the multi tier commission will be calculated based on the commission of the main affiliate.
• Coupon commission should override all the others. If this option is selected, only the coupon commission will be considered when calculating the payout sales commission. No other commissions—the commission for purchasing a certain product or a product from a specific category—will be considered.

You can also specify commission rates for showing a banner, clicking on it, attracting a new customer, etc.

For an affiliate plan you can set a list of products for the sales of which the affiliates will get commissions. The list of products and the appropriate commissions are set in the “Products” tab on the editing affiliate plan page. To add products to the list, click the + Add product button.

In the “Categories” tab, it is possible to specify commissions for purchasing products from certain categories.

In the “Coupons” tab, you can set a commission for the use of promo codes by customers.

To learn more how to create and manage promotions, please refer to the CS-Cart Docs.

Watch this video to learn more about using coupons with the Affiliate PRO add-on.

The add-on allows to create many levels of affiliates. In other words, the affiliates already existing in the store can invite other affiliates and get commissions for the actions of the invited affiliates.

Full information about an affiliate is shown in the General tab:

On this page, you can also see Contact information, Billing address and Shipping address.

In the User groups tab, you can view a list of available user groups and assign a group to an affiliate.

The Affiliate information tab contains affiliate information and commissions of latest periods.

Tip

You can manually set the affiliate who invited the current affiliate using the Affiliate inviter setting.

The most interesting here is Affiliate code. It is used to identify an affiliate in the store. For example, it can be used in promo codes. In other words, an affiliate can distribute such promo codes in your store:

[AFFILIATE-CODE][DELIMETER][PROMO CODE]

Here is an example (code valid in the demo store)

HIXBLNPQAC-123

It will give commission of $1 to the affiliate with ID 4.

And if a user uses such code when placing an order, it will be considered that this customer was attracted to the store by the affiliate, and the affiliate will get the necessary bonuses.

Plan — a plan set for the current affiliate

Status — affiliate’s status: Awaiting approval, Approved, Declined

Commissions of latest periods — information in this table (the number of items, the time period between two periods) is set in the Available settings section.

The Affiliate tree tab shows all tiers of the current affiliate.

Clicking on the affiliate’s name on this page will show the detailed information of the affiliate.

This option lets you give a promo code for each affiliate, which they can spread and get a commission. The promo code will be unique for each affiliate and can consist of any characters, like G6J7Y, or SALE127-rw, or anything you like.

To use this functionality, leave the Use multiple promotions box empty in the add-on settings.

How it works

1. Create a promotion with a coupon code under Marketing > Promotions.

2. Set up a commission for the use of this coupon code in the corresponding plan by going to Marketing > Affiliates > Plans: Pro affiliates.

3. Open the desired affiliate and assign the created coupon code to them (Marketing > Affiliates > Affiliates).

4. Act on the behalf of the affiliate and make sure the coupon code is available under My account > Affiliates.

5. The customer applies the coupon code given by the affiliate at checkout and gets the appropriate bonus.

6. Check to make sure the affiliate received the commission set in the affiliate plan. To do this, go to Marketing > Affiliates > Approve commissions.

This option lets you create multiple promotions for each affiliate plan. In this case a promo code can be used by different affiliates. The promo code will consist of a prefix (or an affiliate id, if you choose so) and the promo code itself. For instance, 145-JK5F.

To use this functionality, select the Use multiple promotions box in the add-on settings.

How it works

1. Create a promotion with a coupon code or use an existing one created in the Marketing > Promotions section.

2. On the editing page of the Affiliate plan (Marketing - Affiliates - Plans) in the Coupons tab, select the necessary promotion and specify a commission for it.

Now the affiliate should see a coupon code in their account on the storefront (My account > Affiliates). This is the code that should be provided to the customer.

Hint

You may want to make the coupon code shorter by using the Affiliate ID is used as coupon prefix setting of the add-on. In this case the coupon code will look like 14-123, where 14 is the affiliate ID and 123 is the coupon code. You can also set up a delimiter between the prefix and coupon code by using the corresponding setting.

For more information, please see the Available settings section.

The customer applies the coupon code on the cart/checkout page and enjoys their bonus.

3. Check to make sure the affiliate received the commission set in the affiliate plan. To do this, go to Marketing > Affiliates > Approve commissions.

The Affiliate block with the affiliate template shows quick links to the pages from the affiliate account.

1. Go to Design - Layouts.
2. Decide where you want to add a block.

3. Choose Affiliate block.

4. Give it a name and select the Affiliate template.

5. Click Create.

Here’s the created block in the layout.

The Affiliate block with the affiliate code template shows the affiliate ID.

1. Go to Design - Layouts.
2. Decide where you want to add a block.

3. Choose Affiliate block.

4. Give it a name and select the Affiliate code template.

5. Click Create.

Here’s the created block in the layout.