How to generate affiliate link for my product, for one of my affiliate?

[marveller]

Hi, I need to generate an affiliate link for one partner only (I am selling his product on my site). But I will put that link on my site's "buy now" button, so we can both track the sells through the report. Let's say if his ID is 12345, how can I generate this link?



For example, my buy button link is:



http://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/gb.php?c=cart;i=es-basic-service;cl=218774;ejc=2



218774 is my number, but what's the GET variable I can add for my partner's ID number?





Thank you.

[E-junkie_Guru]

If you simply wish to have your partner notified whenever his product sells, a simpler and more reliable way of doing that would use the Multiple Emails method of our Integration feature. In the settings of that product, enable "Send transaction data to a URL" and click Next until you reach the Payment Variable Information URL field, where you would enter this (where "user@example.com" should be replaced with your partner's email address):



http://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/oplug.php?m_emails=user@example.com



If the product is already using http://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/oplug.php...etc. in that field for something else (such as PDF Stamping or Aweber integration), you can just add &m_emails=user@example.com at the end of that URL.

[marveller]

Thanks for the tips, this will be indeed useful in the future!



But I think adding his affiliate ID would be ideal for us, so we can track the commissions (50%) and use that report to pay him, without need to track the email notifications separately.

[E-junkie_Guru]

First, note that I edited my last reply above to add a critical piece to the recommended Payment Variable Information URL field, which went missing somehow.



The email notifications are just to inform your partner when their product is sold. To calculate a revenue share, you can view your E-junkie Transaction Log for that product and the relevant time period, which will show you the number of orders and a revenue total for that product and timespan. Then just pay half that amount to your partner by whatever means you wish, or if you have a regular affiliate program, you could edit your monthly masspay.txt file to add a line for your partner before you upload the file to PayPal Mass Payment.



Using affiliate links to track revenue sharing for a partner/supplier would be complicated to set up and at least somewhat unreliable, especially if you have other affiliates. The affiliate referral is tracked for each order, rather than for each item in the order, and the last affiliate referral made for a given buyer is the one that gets tracked for their order. If the buyer used your partner's affiliate Direct Link to add that item to their cart, then at some point used another affiliate's link before taking their order to checkout, the latter affiliate would wind up earning all commissions on that order.



That said, if you really want to proceed with that approach, we explained it here before we realized how unreliable it could be:

http://www.e-junkie.com/bb/topic/2802/pg/0#post7471

[marveller]

Thank you for the reference, really appreciated. But it actually didn't answer my question, I wanted to know how to generate the affiliate link sample for my product, wanted to know what the variables in URL GET stands for. I got a working link for one of the aff I've joined and it has the following format:



https://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/gb.php?ii=333333&c=ib&aff=12345&cl=778899



So I assume that:



1. ii = is for the product ID? If I use my product ID with letters like es-basic-server, can I use like



ii=es-basic-server



or should I use



i=es-basic-server



with a single "i"?



2. c=ib this is universal, correct? What does this stands for?



3. aff=12345 this is for person that joined my affiliate



4. cl=778899 and this is my ID.





Do you have a documentation of list of variables used? Thank you!

[E-junkie_Guru]

Note that affiliate links will only work if the affiliate has actually joined your affiliate program -- i.e., you can't just put an arbitrary affiliate's E-junkie account ID in the link URL and expect it to work if they haven't actually clicked through your sign-up link to join their E-junkie account to your program.



cl= is the merchant's E-junkie Client ID (i.e., yours); this identifies which merchant's affiliate program the link is for.



aff= is the affiliate's E-junkie Client ID; this identifies which affiliate the link is for.



ii= is the product's internal Item ID; this identifies which product the link is for, on product-specific Hop Links or Direct Links (this parameter is omitted for Common Hop Links). This should normally be the same as the product's default Item Number, if you didn't enter a custom Item Number. This will be the same in all affiliates' links for the same product, and it ensures affiliate links will continue to work even if you add/change a custom Item Number for that product.



c= determines whether the link is a Hop Link (c=ib) or Direct Link (c=cart). Note that Direct Links provide a button that says Buy Now, but they actually work as Add to Cart links, displaying the buyer's shopping cart in a new window/tab. This allows an affiliate to put purchase buttons for multiple products on their site and let buyers place multi-item orders directly from the affiliate's site.



I should stress once again that we CANNOT recommend using our affiliate system to calculate revenue sharing with multiple suppliers/partners or in combination with a regular affiliate program. This approach is certain to be unreliable for that purpose, as only the last affiliate referral associated with an order would determine which affiliate earns the commission for ALL items in that order.

[marveller]

Thank you for the details. Will consider the email option in the future, but for now it will work for me, because won't be accepted any other affiliates.



How can I get the ii number? Can't see anywhere from the admin.





Thank you once again.

[E-junkie_Ninja]

You can get your products' ID numbers by going to Seller Admin>View/Edit/Delete Products. The item ID will be in parentheses next to the item name in the drop down menu. You can also select an item from the drop down menu and click Edit, the next page will have the number in the Item Number field on the right side.

[marveller]

Hi Ninja,



Thank you for the response, but my ID in the parentheses are custom item ID letters:



es-basic-service



not numbers. What Guru post above says for the ii variable:



"This should normally be the same as the product's default Item Number, if you didn't enter a custom Item Number. "



So just to confirm, can I use the custom item ID in this case? Because I assume it must have it's own unique static ID number in the backend for the database server, want to make sure it's unrelated. Thank you!

[E-junkie_Monster]

I just double checked and the code we generate will use the static ID number, not the custom number you entered for the product.



The easiest way to get that part of the link is to join your own affiliate program and get the link yourself, it will have all the variables filled in and show your account ID for both the cl and aff parameters, then all you would need to do is swap out the ID number in the aff parameter.