Imagine a situation where you have a network of partner sites all pointing to your web site. By paying your partner sites a commission based on sales, they have an incentive to drive traffic your way but they cost you nothing unless real sales are generated. This is the concept of Affiliate Marketing (a source of visitors and sales. An Affiliate can be another web site that shows your banners, a search engine where you buy keywords, an email list, etc. Typically commissions are paid based on clicks or sales generated.), and is used by all the major eCommerce web sites around the world. If you have ever considered paid for CPM banner advertising you will know how expensive it can be, often for very little return. By building a dedicated affiliate program, you can promote your site far more effectively and at a cost that relates purely to any additional sales made.

Not just for Affiliates - monitor traffic and sales from incoming links

AmeriCommerce's integrated Affiliate tracking can also be used to monitor exactly how much traffic and resulting sales are being generated by specific incoming links to your web site. For example, if you are running "Pay per click" (PPC) campaigns on search engines, you can use the affiliate tracking system to measure their effectiveness by allocating a tracked link to each campaign. Our tracking system will measure the clicks and sales conversions from your PPC traffic, email campaigns, and more!

Exactly how does it work?

Affiliate partners can register for your affiliate program through your web site, or you can add them yourself. Once approved by the site owner, they are given access to a personalized Affiliate Console where they can view their statistics and create product and banner URLs (Uniform Resource Locator. The World Wide Web address of a site on the Internet. The URL for the Internal Revenue Service, for example, is http://www.irs.gov. See also "Domain name".) to paste in to their web site. These URLs contain Campaign AdCodes (a unique identifier which shows where visitors, customers, and orders originate. This can be from a Keyword Campaign, Banner, Email, etc.), and when clicked by their site visitors, are tracked by AmeriCommerce and a cookie is set in their browser. The visitor is automatically forwarded by this URL to your web site - this can be any page on your web site. If the visitor subsequently makes a purchase within the cookie expiry period (this is defined by you) then the sale is automatically tracked by our system as originating from the affiliate partner.

AmeriCommerce offers a robust Affiliate Program as part of the advanced tracking and analysis that is performed on every site visitor. Some of the features include: 

• Web-based affiliate tracking system
• Track purchases made via your affiliates' web sites
• Know exactly how much traffic and sales are generated by incoming links to your site
• Sign up affiliate partners yourself, or let them apply automatically through your web site
• You define the life of the tracking cookie
• Select to pay either a per click, percentage or flat rate commission
• All new approved affiliates automatically provided with necessary HTML code to place on their web site
• Provide "deep links" to any URL on your web site
• Secure password protected reporting area where your affiliates can review their paid & unpaid commissions
• Advanced reporting and analysis console

Affiiliate specific discounts and promotions

Using the flexible Discount system in AmeriCommerce, you can offer special discounts and promotional items to customers coming from a specific affiliate or Campaign AdCode.

Powerful reporting

You have a complete affiliate administration area which provides stats that go way beyond the typical conversion rate calculations. Know your Sales Per Ad Dollar (SPAD. Amount of sales generated for every dollar spent in advertising. Sales / Ad Cost = SPAD), Cost Per Customer (CPC. The cost in advertising dollars spent for each customer gained by an AdCode. Sales / Ad Cost = CPC), and more! Drill down to each individual affiliate or Campaign AdCode. This information is very powerful and allows you to monitor the relative effectiveness of affiliate partners and individual campaigns on your web site. You can also see at a glance how much commission is owed to whom for any sales originating from your affiliate partners

Affiliates sign up and manage their accounts at:

Affiliate Signup URL: http://www.yourdomain.com/store/affiliates/join/apply.aspx

Affiliate Console URL: http://www.yourdomain.com/store/affiliates