Hotcakes Affiliate Registration Module

Overview

When used correctly, an affiliate program can help to greatly increase your sales through referrals by these affiliates.  The affiliate registration module is one of two modules that work together to help provide a complete affiliate program experience.  This registration module allows a prospective affiliate to submit their intent to be part of your program.

Requirements

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

• Have access to your Hotcakes store administration
• Configure your store using the getting started wizard or do it manually
• Have a basic understanding of how an affiliate program works
• Be familiar with how to create pages and add modules to pages

Getting Started

The information provided here is based upon the default configuration of Hotcakes and the default viewset. Your views may have more or less functionality, depending on how it was implemented by your technical team.

Affiliate Registration Module

The afffiliate registration module is not placed for you anywhere on your site. If you wish to use it, you should add it to a page, as desired. When you add this module to a page, it will begin working immediately without any configuration required.

Different Views for Different Visitors

Depending on whether or not you're logged in, a visitor may end up seeing a slightly different version of this module.  In some cases, visitors may not see the module at all.  This is all described below.

Not Logged In

Anonymous visitors will see the view shown below.  All of the possible affiliate program fields are seen because the visitor is unknown.  The fields that are specific to the affiliate registration are discussed below, but you can learn more about the address information in the address book editing documentation.

In this case, the module must assume that the visitor doesn't yet have a user account on your site.  Therefore, when a visitor fills out the registration form, a user account is created for them.  If they already have a user account, it may be a better preference to have this login first instead.

Setting	Description
Username	This is the username that the affiliate wishes to use to login with on your site.  Like any other user account, the username must be unique.
E-Mail	This is the e-mail address that the affiliate wishes to have associated with their account.  This is also the e-mail address where they'll receive notifications.
Password	Like with any other site, this is a password value that will be used with the username to authenticate or login to your site later.
Confirm Password	This value allows your customer to verify the password they just entered to ensure that there aren't any typos.
First Name	This is simply the first name of the primary person associated with the affiliate account.  It should be a real name, because you might want to use this later for tax reporting and payments.
Last Name	This is simply the last name of the primary person associated with the affiliate account.  It should be a real name, because you might want to use this later for tax reporting and payments.
My Affiliate ID	The affiliate ID is generally not the same as your username, and in almost all cases it shouldn't be.  Specifying your own affiliate ID allows you to create a value that represents your brand.  This value will be used by referred customers during checkout, and it will also be present in referral URLs.  This value must be unique and may not be the same as other affiliates in the store.
Referral Affiliate ID	If the affiliate that's currently registering was referred by another affiliate, they should enter that affiliate ID here.  The referring affiliate can get credit in a variety of ways by referring new affiliates to the site.  If the referral affiliate ID is found, the registration will be associated appropriately.  If the value doesn't match any known or approved affiliates, nothing will happen and the registration will still be submitted.
I Agree to Affiliate Terms	This checkbox allows you to ensure that your affiliates agree to and are aware of the terms and conditions of your affiliate program.  The terms can be set when you configure the affiliate program.  Clicking the terms link will open your terms in a pop-up window.

Logged In

If the visitor is logged in, they'll see several of the registration fields removed, as shown below.  These values are not necessary, because they'll simply be inherited from the visitors profile.  If they wish to change this information at any time, they can edit their profile on the website.  All of the other fields are the same as described above.

Automatic Navigation

If a customer is logged in and they've already registered as an affiliate, visiting a page with the affiliate  registration module on it will automatically redirect them to the page with the affiliate dashboard on it.  There's no need to for you to do anything else.  It will just work.

IMPORTANT NOTE

Please don't put the affiliate registration module on the same page as the affiliate dashboard module.  If they're on the same page, visitors that are approved affiliates will end up seeing a "too many redirects" error.  These modules should always be placed on separate pages.

Successful Registration

Once an affiliate has both successfully registered and been approved, they'll be added to a security role called "Hotcakes Affiliate."  You'll be able to use this security role to create promotions, contact them via e-mail, and provide security-based content access for your affiliates.

Module Settings

This module doesn't have any module settings specific to affiliate program functionality.

Viewset View Location

You'll find the views for this module in the following location in your viewset:

~\Views\AffiliateRegistration\