It is common for sites to give a commission to those sites that referred successful customers.  CoastCart offers a simple way to know who deserves commissions on sales.

When somebody links to your cart, they need to place in their code a number or series of letters and/or number that you have assigned the link owner.   The system then places a cookie on a customer's browser.  When you view the order you know if it came from one of your referring sites or not. 

Imagine that you have set up a system where you pay your referrers 5% of the total sale.  You have assigned a website the affiliate code abcd1234, which is something that you choose and maintain. 

Setting up a link to your shopping cart

If an affiliate is linking to the cart home page, they need to use ?ref=abcd1234, for example: 

  <a href="http://www.mydomain.com/cart/default.asp?ref=abcd1234">go to cart</a>

If an affiliate wants to deep link to a specific cart product, they need to use &ref=abcd1234, for example:

<a href="http://www.mydomain.com/cart/default.asp?act=show_item&item=88&ref=abcd1234">go to cart</a>

To get this string, open the cart to the specific product and copy the URL from the address bar.   Then, you will know that an order has been referred because you will see a new field appear in your order view indicating which referrer should get the commission.

It is up to you to forward the commission on to the appropriate site.

How long will the cart keep track of an affiliate?

Once a person clicks on an affiliate link to go to your cart, that affiliate code is stored in a cookie for one calendar day. The person can then leave the cart to browse somewhere else, or even closes the browser. If they come back and buy a product within a calendar day, the cart should still see the affiliate in the cookie and give the affiliate credit for it.

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