merchant needs help!

how to track buyers

[AL_Lange]

Hi,

I just found this board and after reading it a while and not finding my answer, I thought I'd post it.

I have a small company and would like to have a few handpicked sites as affiliates. I'm too small to go through CJ, etc.

I want to pay "per sale" - not clickthrus, and can't seem to come up with a way to know that a customer came from a clickthru. I can check logs & use cookies to see how many got to the site and from where, but once there, I have no way of knowing which call and buy.

Any ideas greatly appreciated.
Please email me as I don't frequent this board.

Thanks in advance for any help!

-AL

[Marcia]

Welcome to the board, glad you stopped by.

>>Please email me as I don't frequent this board.

We generally post replies directly to the forum for responses rather than taking it to email for individual help, so that all of our members can benefit. If you're interested in consulting services you might want to check out our Commercial Exchange [webmasterworld.com] which is here for that purpose.

Why don't you take a few minutes and check out the WebmasterWorld Welcome and Guide to the Basics [webmasterworld.com]. You might decide to stick around for a while. ;)

[Craigster]

AL_Lange

I too am looking for the exact information you are seeking.

Please sticky mail me.

Craig

[MWpro]

Simple but efficent solution: Give each affiliate a unique number, and when the customer goes to buy one of your products on the form will be a field saying "Enter the affiliate number of your referrer" or something like that... if they were referred by an affiliate they would enter the number, if not they would leave it blank.

[paladin]

Or a little more of an advanced solution:

1. Give each affiliate a unique ID number (example 1111).
2. When he puts the links on his site have him add the id like www.yoursite.com?affid=1111
3. When a visitor comes to your site store the aff id in a cookie.
4. Now when you process the order forms automatically add the affid to the output (without the visitor seeing it)

You know know which affiliate closed the sale.

This will not work for visitors who do not have cookies enabled, but it should work for about 95% of your visitors.

Good Luck