Forum Moderators: buckworks
I am in need of some help regarding this, and PLEASE take it easy...I'm pretty new at this, and this may be a stupid question. I am in the process of starting an e-commerce site, and I am thinking of contacting the owners of a few specific forums that are related to my product, and partner with the forum owners to sell my product through their forum. I am would be wanting to use the forum as the "gateway" so to speak, because I believe that the loyalty to the forum will drive sales.
Which leads me to the problem....I am wanting to share a specific percentage/amount per transaction with the forum owner, but I am not sure how I could accomplish that with a shopping cart (as of now, I am thinking PayPal WebSite Payments Pro). I want them to have the peace of mind that I am not ripping them off, but I obviously don't want them to have my password to my merchant/PayPal account. Is there any way to show them that I am dealing fairly with them, while at the same time keeping it safe for me? I have heard people mention a affiliate script I could produce, however, I am very unsure about how this would work...would this be a PayPal script, or individual shopping cart script...and also, how would they knew that the script wasn't "bogus" and that they were receiving all of the sales.
Thanks in advance for everyones help!
Alec
Will the products you sell be common to all of the forums or different products for different forums? I'm asking this because it seems to me a mall concept might work if they're different - one mall housing different store fronts - one backend.
if you will use PayPal, affiliate software can work for you very smoothly.
Affiliate software (affiliate script) installs on your website and tracks clicks / sales from affiliates / calculates commission for affiliates.
PayPal has IPN - a callback function that notifies affiliate software of each purchase, so it's sure your PayPal account and Affiliate accounts are in sync.
If you are going to pay % per sale of all products, than the situation is relatively simple. Multiple products with different commissions can also be implemented, but you need to check whether the software is able to handle it..
Martin
