Merchants: what site changes to make

When you joined an aff. network?

[johnnie]

Just out of curiosity,

What kind of changes did you have to make to your site when you joined an aff. program? Did you have to put up a new checkout system? Or is there a script that catches certain information during chekout and stores it in the aff. network's database? If so, doesn't it break your SSL connection to the customer? Or is this server-side script hosted locally?

[bhartzer]

You generally shouldn't have to make many changes (if any at all) to your current shopping cart/checkout system.

[johnnie]

Then how do affiliate networks 'catch' the sale? They do need some kind of in-the-middle script to store the info in their database right?