Trackable Links are available again for automatic coupons and order attribution. Usage tracking and affiliate credit data remains temporarily unavailable.
Your affiliates can use the commissions they earn by going to your store using the tracking link provided them upon signup. Your affiliates can see the traffic (hits) and order totals as well as the total amount of credit available to them.
When making a purchase, the affiliate uses the commission earned as payment for items in your store. To do this, your affiliate will click the reporting link provided to them. If they have any available credit (commissions), they will see the following message underneath the Visits and Revenue graphs and orders (if applicable):
"You have an available merchandise credit of 00.00. Go Shopping with your credit."
The Go Shopping part of this message is a link and the number represented by the 00.00 is the dollar amount of commission credit the affiliate has available to spend in your store. The affiliate may now return to your store to use this commission by clicking on the Go Shopping link.
Note: The Go Shopping link will appear only if the affiliate is signed in with their login ID. If affiliates do not see the link, ask them to sign in. If affiliates do not have a login ID, ask them to create one.
The affiliate must use this link to be able to use the credit through your store. If they enter your store through search, a domain name or the first trackable link, the store will not recognize the shopper as the affiliate and will require that they pay for any product in the traditional manner.
After the affiliate clicks this link, they will be taken to your store. They may then shop for items they wish to buy with their credit. Upon putting an item in the Shopping Basket, they will see a message that informs them of their available credit:
"You have a merchandise credit of XX.XX"
The XX.XX represents the current dollar amount of credit.
Once the affiliate reaches the billing section of the order form, they will see the total of their purchases as any customer would. They will, in addition, also see a line-item called Credit which will deduct the applicable amount of the affiliate's credit from the order. The system will still require the affiliate to supply a payment method. They will not be charged, however, if the credit amount covers the cost of the order. This line item will not appear on the email order confirmation to the affiliate, but it will appear on the order page in Store Manager that the merchant can view.
After your affiliate shops with this credit, any credit amount used will be noted in the Trackable Links section of Store Manager. An example of this activity will look like the following:
| Last 365 Days | Total |
| Visits | Orders | Revenue | Credits | Used | Balance | Linker |
| 5 | 2 | 215.40 | 21.54 | 10.15 | 11.39 | Picasso's Art Store |
If your affiliate exceeds their amount of credit in their purchase, your store will deduct the credit from the subtotal and then apply the difference to the payment method selected. Once this has happened, the Balance figure in the example above will return to zero and Credits will equal Used.
Finally, it is not recommended that you allow your affiliates to use both credit and cash compensation. Since a cash disbursement will not update their credit total, yet a credit purchase will, it will make accounting for correct, current credit balance difficult to manage.
See Also
