Forum Moderators: skibum
I'm in the process of setting up a site in which revolves around advertising for resort accommodations in my area. Originally, the idea was to have an exclusive contract with a accommodations company where I would book reservations garnered through my site.
(I would charge the customer the rack rate for a room and pay the accommodations provider. Following, the provider would send me back a 10% commission.)
However, now I am trying to devise a system where I could simply forward the prospect inquiries from my site and have the accommodations provider handle the information requests and reservation details. The problem is that I have no idea what would be the best way to go about this? And is there any type of system that would provide some sort of checks and balances where I would be able to determine if a customer who was forwarded to them decided to actually make reservations.
I would love to get any and all ideas. Thanks so much for your time.
As far as checking to see if a directed customer actually signs up, I've used a few methods for this, all that require server-side scripting on the target site:
1. On the page that they're redirected to, have a session variable (server-side scripting jargon) set up with a unique ID that remains with them. The link that they use to get to their site should contain something like http://www.targetsite.com/?ref=yourid so they can store your referral ID. For safety purposes, the script should also look at the HTTP_REFERRER variable and see who the referrer was. You can also set a cookie that keeps them set as your referral for a month or so, this way their referral status remains even when they leave the site (assuming their cookies were turned on). Then, whenever a client actually signs up, any stored session variables or cookies that relate to referrals should likewise be sent along with their other information.
2. Another less technical option is referral IDs. Tell a person that when they sign up for your target site's services that they should enter your Referrer ID in the form that they sign up in. Usually it's best to offer them something in return for this (i.e., gaining access to extra site services, refunding x% of what they paid, etc.) because otherwise they might not remember. I don't like this method, but I've seen it used.
I'm sure there are other ways, but #1 is a pretty safe bet if you can implement it.
