Affiliate Report: Affiliate Activity View

Overview

If you run an affiliate program, you can get reports on your affiliate sales in Hotcakes.  This report will not only help you to track the sales from affiliates, but you'll be able to edit/approve affiliates, make payments, and more.

The affiliate report has several views.  This article covers the affiliate activity view of the affiliate report.

The affiliate activity view gives you some insight into what a specific affiliate has been doing in terms of referring business and other affiliates to your site.

Requirements

The following prerequisites will be necessary to accomplish the goals of this article:

• Have access to your Hotcakes store administration
• Have the affiliate program enabled
• Configure your site to allow affiliates to register

Getting Started

This report and all of it's functionality will not be useful until you have at least one affiliate added to your site.

Affiliate Report: Affiliate Activity View

In order to see the affiliate activity view, you'll need to already be in the affiliate report, and then click on the affiliate's name in the results grid, shown below.  In this example, you'd click on Jon or Alana.

You'll end up looking at the activity view now, as described in detail below.  

The left panel has two buttons available for you to perform a couple of administrative tasks.  First, you edit the affiliate's profile by clicking the "Edit Profile" button.  If you'd like to log a payment towards the affiliate while you're here, you can use the "Add Payment" button in the left panel.  It works the same here as it does in the main view.

There are many sections to this view, so we'll break them down one at a time, beginning with the header section you see below.

You'll see the name of the affiliate prominently displayed at the top of the page.  It will be followed by their chosen affiliated ID and a clickable e-mail address so you can contact them immediately.

Payments Section

This section allows you to see the payment history and what's upcoming for the affiliate in terms of commission.  You're easily empowered to do quick auditing of an affiliate account, as well as address any questions that are getting asked over the phone or during a meeting.

The header portion of the section allows you to see how much commission has been earned this month, how much you need to currently pay them, and how much you've paid them since they first became an affiliate.

The grid above will show all payments matching the selected date range, which is "This Month" by default.

Column	Description
Amount	You'll see the amount of the payment you sent to the affiliate in this column.
Date	This is the date when the payment was logged, which may not necessarily match the date you actually sent it.
Memo	If a memo was entered when you logged the payment, it will be shown here.
Attachment	Anytime an attachment is included with the payment, it will be shown here.  You'll be able to click on the attachment to download and view it.

Orders Section

The order information you see here will include all of the orders that have been associated to the affiliate.  This begins with a header portion that outlines how many orders have been attributed to the affiliate this month, and what the grand total sum of those orders is.

As before, you can select any desired date range and filter the grid to show information for the chosen date range. Here, you'll see the listing of orders that match the date range, which defaults to "This Month."

Column	Description
Grand Total	This is the grand total that the customer was charged for the specific order.
Order Number	This is the number that was assigned to the order as a result of it being placed during checkout.
Commission	This column outlines the commission amount that was earned for the order.
Date	You'll find the date that the order was placed here.

Referrals Section

The referrals section allows you to see how productive this specific affiliate has been in referring more affiliates to sign up on your site.  If you combine this with the Orders section above, you'll have a really good idea of how productive this affiliate is in generating revenue for your store.

The header portion of this section begins by giving you a quick insight into how many referrals they've generated this month, versus the entire time they've been an affiliate.

Following the header portion, you see a couple of search fields.  These allow you to filter the referred affiliate listing below, so you can find a specific referred affiliate.

Column	Description
Affiliate Name	This is the full name of the affiliate.
Affiliate ID	You'll find the ID that the affiliate chose when they signed up on your site.
E-Mail Address	This is the e-mail address that the affiliate has associated to their account.
Total Revenue	In this column, you'll find the sum total of all order revenue that this affiliate has generated over time.