Revindex Storefront will automatically track any online sales referrals configured in your DNN system allowing you to eventually pay out commissions to your affiliate partners on pay-for-performance basis. Affiliates are a great way to generate more sales easily and cost effectively.
The Storefront integrates with DNN standard affiliate management system making it possible to track affiliate referrals arriving on any of your Web pages. For example, your affiliate partner may send customers to your home page or to a special promotion page you created. In both cases, your affiliate will be correctly tracked and credited for the completed sale.
To configure the affiliate tracking, please follow these steps listed below to create your vendor record. A vendor is any partner, company or individual who has a working relationship with your business.
- You must first install the DNN Vendors module if you haven't already installed it.
- From the persona bar, go to the Manage > Vendors page.
- Click on Add New Vendor.
- Enter all the required information for your new vendor.
- Click Update.
- Select the vendor you just created.
- Towards the bottom, under the Affiliate Referrals section, click on Add New Affiliate.
- Click Update.
- Select the newly created affiliate.
- Click on Send Notification. The vendor will receive an email with a link that can be used to track his referrals to your site.
The vendor is now your affiliate partner. He can use the link to redirect visitors to your site and earn sales commission. The email containing the link has an embedded Affiliate ID that looks like this:
http://site.com/Default.aspx?affiliateid=1
In earlier versions of DNN 7 and older, the AffiliateID query parameter will automatically persist to a cookie on any landing page. Starting with DNN 8 and higher, you need to add your own Javascript code to detect the Affiliate ID query parameter and cookiefy to the browser. You can use the following script to cookiefy the Affiliate ID value. This code should be placed in any page you want to be used as your landing page. A good place to include this script so that it tracks on any page is to set the code under the persona bar Settings > Site Settings under the Page Output Settings. Please note the script uses a default value of 30 days for tracking. You can increase this value if you want to track for longer than 30 days.
<script>
var parsedUrl = new URL(window.location.href.toLowerCase())
var affiliateID = null
if (parsedUrl.pathname.match(/affiliateid\/(\d+)/i))
affiliateID = parsedUrl.pathname.match(/affiliateid\/(\d+)/i)[1]
else if (parsedUrl.searchParams.get("affiliateid"))
affiliateID = parsedUrl.searchParams.get("affiliateid")
if (affiliateID) {
var d = new Date();
d.setDate(d.getDate() + 30);
var expires = "expires="+ d.toUTCString();
document.cookie = "AffiliateId=" + affiliateID + ";" + expires + ";path=/";
}
</script>
At this point, your affiliate partner can refer the visitor to any designated landing page on your site as long as the AffiliateID parameter is attached to the URL. For example, to direct the visitor to one of your product pages, you can attach the AffiliateID parameter to the URL as shown:
http://site.com/rvdsfpid/coffee-40/language/Product.aspx?affiliateid=1
Once the AffiliateID parameter is detected by DNN, the visitor can freely visit any other page and will be tracked for the duration determined by your DNN site. Any sales completed by the visitor is now associated with the Affiliate ID.
Commissions can be paid out periodically at your own discretion via PayPal, check, wire transfer, etc. You can view the "Affiliate performance" report from the Storefront Marketing > Reports menu to find out how many sales orders and the total amount (excluding shipping, handling and taxes) are attributed to the vendor. You can simply multiply the number by your commission rate to determine the commission owed to your vendor. You can also create custom reports under Configuration > Reports menu to get more detailed information about your affiliates or automatically calculate the commissions if needed. For more information, please see How to create custom reports.