Admin: Affiliates

Overview

The Affiliates area lets you create an affiliate program and configure its settings. Affiliates are a great marketing option for store owners. Affiliates provide you with sales and they potentially earn a commission for each sale.  This allows you to potentially reach new customers that may have previously been inaccessible or too expensive to target before.

Requirements

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

• Have access to your Hotcakes store administration

Getting Started

There are no tasks required to proceed with this article.

Administrating Your Affiliate Program

Affiliates must be approved before they can access your program. The e-mail templates area shows you the e-mails that are sent to you and the affiliate during the approval process.

The Affiliates configuration view is found in the control panel.

You can configure several settings.

Setting Name	Description
Default Commission	Set the commission to a flat rate or a percentage of the sale.  If you choose flat rate, the affiliate commission will always be the same for each successful purchase.  If you choose percentage of sale, the affiliate's commission will be calculated based upon the order subtotal.
Default Referral Days	The number of days the affiliate is credited with the commission after the customer leaves the site.
Conflict Resolution Mode	Specify if the system chooses the original or new affiliate should there be a conflict on who is credited with the sale.
Affiliate Registrations Require Approval	Check this box if you want to approve new affiliates.  This is checked by default.
Display Affiliate Children Information	Display any child affiliates that the parent affiliate recruits.
Show Affiliate ID on Checkout Page	Check if you want to allow customers to specify the affiliate ID they want to credit with the sale during checkout.
Notify on New Affiliate Registrations	Check if you want to receive notifications for new affiliate signups.  The notifications will go to the primary store address, set in the E-Mail Addresses administration area.
Affiliate Agreement	Type the agreement for affiliates. You can use HTML to format and style your agreement.  This agreement will be shown to and agreed to by prospective affiliates when they sign up for your program.

Click Save Changes to save any changes you might have made to the affiliate program.