Need a Good Commercial Affiliate System for Client

something cheap but reliable

[stace]

Hi guys,

I need to find a good but cheap affiliate solution for a book/audio publisher who wants to sell his books all over the web through affiliates. I've looked at some of the pricey stuff (i.e. Commission Junction, etc)-- and some cheaper stuff like affiliateshop.com--- any other suggestions? I'd love to avoid paying an upfront "programming fee" or whatever-- and find a nice $30 to $50 a month program where we can track what sales come from whom. He already has e-commerce enabled on his site- we just need a way to track the affiliate stuff.

thanks for any suggestions!

[sun818]

How do you track sales from affiliates if it is not integrated with the shopping cart? Do you just pay per click? In any event, I suggest you look at Mals-E -- The mTracker feature is free and might be a usable solution for you. I use it to track sales conversion rates from Google AdWords and to a lesser degree Overture.

[eljefe3]

The best thing to do is to look through a few different script sites and find the best solution for your budget and needs. [hotscripts.com...] and [cgi-resources.com...] are a couple of nice sites that should have what you are looking for.

[stace]

Thanks for the replies- but unfortunately I think the client is on a shared server, and I can't upload SQL scripts and things. I need to find a rather simplistic affiliate solution- or find a company that will host the entire thing- a virtual store created just for the affiliate stuff- as well as the tracking of the traffic and sales from our affiliates.

Any ideas?

thanks in advance...

[Grumpus]

My e-mail addy is turned on in my profile. Got a couple of solutions you might be interested in (and your client may be able to work with). It's a perl script based cart written by the guy who created the Internet's first shopping cart. For something simple like this, it'd be perfect.

Write me if perl will work and I'll give you a URL to sort through it all.

[stace]

Hola Grumpus,

I installed the Mal's Ecommerce-- what a blessing! To think that it's free....how amazing is that? This guy Mal must have some kinda big heart for webmasters! The program works like a charm- shopping cart has performed flawlessly, and I already have an affiliate! And it's not even my birthday...

:) thanks all for the suggestions

[Grumpus]

Cool. I had a client using Mal for a while and it went pretty well - until he started wanting to do funky stuff with it. For general purposes, as you described, it'll probably be a good solution for him for a good long while!

G.