X-Cart:Affiliate

Overview

X-Affiliate enables you to launch a full-featured affiliate program in your store, which can help you advertise your store and the products you sell. When the affiliate program works, your store takes the main advantage of the Internet marketing, which is to distribute information to global audience at comparatively low price: You promote your store not only with the help of your store management team, but also through a network of your affiliates who get commission for the sales they promote. This will certainly make your online business more competitive.

With X-Affiliate you can manage your partners' accounts, calculate and track partner commission, create affiliate banners and links, collect versatile affiliate statistics, build a multi-level marketing system and even take closer control of third-party advertising campaigns in which your online store may take part.

The key X-Affiliate features are:

• Unlimited number of affiliate partners of different levels.
• Unlimited number of affiliate plans.
• Ability to setup product- and category-based commission.
• Full control of your partners' commission.
• Control of third-party advertising programs.
• Adjustable email notification.

How X-Affiliate works

In general, the idea of how the affiliate program built with X-Affiliate should work is as follows: The store administrator creates an affiliate plan and defines the rules on how to calculate commission for the plan, then the administrator creates a number of affiliate banners and allows new affiliates to register. A new affiliate partner gets registered in the affiliate program, subscribes to the affiliate plan and gets access to the special interface where the partner can generate the codes for the affiliate banners created by the store administrator. The partner then includes the banners into third-party resources on the Internet, companion websites, newsletters, forum signatures, bulletin boards, etc. When a new buyer comes to the store through a banner placed by the partner, the partner receives a percentage of the store's earning according to the rules in the affiliate plan which the partner is subscribed to. The commission goes to the partner's account automatically. The administrator then pays the commission to the partner in any preferable manner - X-Cart and X-Affiliate do not interfere with payment process in any way. After the partner commission has been paid off, the administrator should mark it as paid.

Since X-Affiliate is an add-on module, it can be used together with the X-Cart shopping cart only. When the module is installed and activated, it adds a number of new controls to the X-Cart Admin area and a new user interface, Partner area, and introduces a new type of user, Partner.

New controls in the Admin area allow the store administrator to manage all the aspects of the affiliate program. The majority of controls can be accessed through the special menu Affiliates, which is shown in the picture below. Other controls introduced by X-Affiliate are smoothly built into the basic X-Cart controls.

Partner area is a special password-protected user interface with the URL like www.example.com/xcart/partner/ where www.example.com/xcart/ is the URL to where X-Cart is installed. The Partner area is used by your affiliates to access different resources, including codes of affiliate banners and links, sales statistics, payment details, etc. To access the Partner area one must be a registered member of your affiliate program. The Partner area is shown in the picture below.

Partner is a user who registered to participate in your affiliate program. A partner can log in to the personal account in the Partner area, get assigned to an affiliate plan and earn commission for promoting your products, and even recruit his or her own affiliates and receive a part of their earnings if they promote a sale as well. The number of partners of all levels is unlimited.