how to set up affilate

as the title says how do you set up the affilate package?
i have it installed ok but i noticed in the blurb it says see our faq or terms & conditions

how do you sort that out please?

also when someone goes to register it says have you read the 'about us'

weird thing to say
surely it should be T&C's
for now i have made a temp affilate T&C's in the info section

not sure if thats whats meant to happen

check your admin System - Settings - edit your store - Option tab

Change 'Affiliate Terms' drop down to use your new info page

kool sorted thanks

is there any info on how to use the programme?

i made a demo user and it looks really complicated lol

any info on this pls ?

It's frustrating that it's not easy to find instructions on how to set up an affiliate. I'm no expert, but this is how I think it works.

1. A prospective affiliate goes to http://yoursite.com/index.php?route=affiliate/account

2. S/he signs up as a new affiliate.

3. The stupid part is that the admin doesn't receive an email notification that someone has signed up to be an affiliate, so an admin must regularly go to the admin backend and go to Sales>Affiliates to see if anyone has signed up. This is a stupid because if you only get one affiliate per month, you'll be wasting lots of time checking every few days or you'll piss off affiliates if you only check once a month. So it should be fixed.

4. Approve whatever the affiliate(s). This is also stupid since all you have is an email address. There is no application where the affiliate can point you to his website. If OpenCart won't give the admin more details about the prospective affiliates, then there should be an "auto-approve" setting, where anyone who signs up gets automatically approved. You can always revoke it later if they're bad.

5. After approval, the affiliate will get an email with a tracking #.

6. The affiliate goes back to your site and signs in http://yoursite.com/index.php?route=affiliate/account

7. He selects "Custom Affiliate Tracking Code", which will take you to /index.php?route=affiliate/tracking

8. The affiliate types in a specific product in your shop and a custom tracking code is generated. He copies this code and uses it in his promotion campaign.

For example, in my site, this product:
http://francistapon.com/shop/index.php? ... uct_id=61/

Becomes:
http://francistapon.com/shop/index.php? ... 6b74eefb75

From the customer's point of view, everything looks the same.

IMPORTANT: The affiliate must append this tracking # at the end of a SPECIFIC product in your shop. Not a category. Not the entire store. Just ONE specific product. If the customer buys a different product, then the affiliate gets NOTHING. Stupid, but that's the way it works. If the customer buys 3 products, the affiliate only gets credit for the one product he referred to. Stupid, but that's the system.

I'm very happy that OpenCart has an affiliate program and I hope it will improve it soon, especially in giving affiliates general referral credit, not just for ONE product.

thanks for the info
yes it is complicated lol

3. The stupid part is that the admin doesn't receive an email notification that someone has signed up to be an affiliate, so an admin must regularly go to the admin backend and go to Sales>Affiliates to see if anyone has signed up. This is a stupid because if you only get one affiliate per month, you'll be wasting lots of time checking every few days or you'll piss off affiliates if you only check once a month. So it should be fixed.

Hi.
I found a simple solution to this one. Go to:
store/catalog/language/english/mail/affiliate.php
and add something like "'To confirm your registration, please reply to this email." to the text on the line with $_['text_approval'] (which is line 5 of nothing's changed)
This way, in the email confirming registration, a prospective affiliate will at list get an instruction to let you know he applied. Not perfect, but at least something.
Cheers.

Yes I agree with the original post, at least the default setting for affiliate approval should be "auto approval" or let the admin to receive email for affiliate signup.

Has someone come up with a VQMOD addon that better handles the whole process?

There is a solution for this.

This vqmod extension Alerts the Admin when a new affiliate signs up http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... on_id=5163

And if you want to make the "custom affiliate tracking' page a bit more user friendly you might also like my vqmod extension here
http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... on_id=6688

Surely an affiliate must be able to setup the account without having to submit a code for every single product on an online shop with over 1,000 products.
If not I doubt anyone will bother becoming an affiliate.

No Paulski, that is actually how opencart's affiliate system works. It is not very user friendly is it?

That's why I made this extension http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... on_id=6688 it fixes the problem by giving a universal affiliate link/code that will track the sale of any product through the ONE affiliate link.

An alternative would be to give the affiliate their own coupon code which never expires. This way, there wouldn't be any 'lost' commissions, and you could still see exactly which orders used which coupon codes.

One of the downfalls though is that you then have to offer the customer something extra too (such as free shipping or what-have-you), on top of offering the affiliate their commission.