[ic] Affiliate program?

Paul Jordan interchange-users@icdevgroup.org
Tue Jan 7 23:14:01 2003


> Has anyone developed an affiliate program for the newer
> version of Interchange? I have searched archives and
> recent newsletters and the only mentions are of people
> wanting to do one without a single mention of a complete
> one.
>
> To be clear I am not looking to integrate with a third
> party. We are looking into developing our own where we can
> offer quarterly payments through PayPal or monthly store
> credits.
>
> I have briefly played with the affiliate features in 4.9.2
> but could not seem to get them to work as expected and
> could not find much in the way of help. Looking for
> something where customers can easily sign up with minimal
> interaction on our part. Any ideas or pointers for how
> others have gone about development of such a feature are
> greatly appreciated.
>
>
> Alex
>
>
> p.s. Anyone work out a wishlist/wedding registry feature
> either?


Hi Alex,

"Affiliates" is a pretty general term IMO. When I looked into setting up
affiliates I looked at the demos stuff and was surprised to find that it
wasn't more than area where other stores, or websites, can get credit for
sending customers your way... that is unless I was not doing something
right.

I recently started on (my definition of) an affiliates interface called AFI
(affiliate fulfillment Interface). It will be where a person can sell items
on our website, but he will ship them out himself (and other scenarios). We
take care of marketing, payment, website, etc etc, and they log into the
AFI, and ship their products. They only see their relevant portion of the
order. It is in it's very early stages, mostly just the initial shipment
view page that weeds out their products and shows relevant order
information.

That is what I thought affiliates were :) anyways, I am on another project
for right now, but still do a little work it in my spare time. The plans are
growing into a place where they can input products into the database, but on
(in a way) inactive, awaiting for admin approval.

Mine will take a while because we also sell downloads so it must facilitate
swapping files around safely and logically for admin review.

Anyways, I am trying to get my taxes done right now, but after next week, I
would be happy to share any code with anybody else who is implementing a
similar affiliates facility. I believe I remember Jeff Dafoe commenting on
the affiliates portion of IC, he made it seem like they logged into ADMIN,
and were able to see/do all sorts of cool things... but I don't get that
impression, because pages/affiliate is basically what I described in my
first paragraph. But he seemed to think it was better than the type of bread
that is sliced.

He could be right, he is very knowledgeable (has a nice shop), either that
or Mike Heins is secretly selling "Interchange XP" behind our backs ;)


Also, I have a type of wishlist/registry I suppose. It is called a
'mediabox'. Customers can create an account, and places any item into their
mediabox. They can Add, Delete, Name, Rename, Describe... their mediabox(s).
Then, the item can be Copied, Moved, Deleted between the mediaboxes, and you
can add multiple items to any mediabox all at once. The cool feature is you
can 'invite' people into you mediabox, IOW we provide a facility called
Client View, where the invited folks can input (1.original persons username,
2. box name, 3. arbitrary password) and then see all the persons choices. It
is going to evolve to a collaboration area. Inviting people is automated in
the accounts section.

It is pretty cool. You need Mysql database, as one of the tables has a
unique key spread over two columns, although it could probably be rewritten.
I also heavily use SQL instead of IC imports. However I so so inside of the
[query] tag, which I get the impression you don't need a mysql db to use in
conjunction with.

Anyways, I would be happy to share that as well, however it would take a
while to get all portions together (about pages and two tables) and notes,
and post as-is after next week. I say as-is because I don't have the time
right now to pretty it up and make a tutorial.

Sorry for the long post, let me know if there is any interest and I will get
some stuff together next week. Also, if people want to see the media box,
give me some lead time to make sure my development sites version is still
functional, as I don't want bogus accounts on my live system. But hey, maybe
between us all we could get a wishlist and other affiliate stuff going.
e.g., The wishlist would need to be restructered for general non Mysql
use... etc

HTH

Paul