Best practice for affiliate tracking

#1

Just curious if anyone has a best practice for tracking affiliate sales (preferably without adding another plugin). I know we can set promo codes and see how many times they are used which is great, except the only thing is our product is a free month through the affiliate and then they get charged and the affiliate only gets paid if they continue service for that second month. So if 10 people sign up with the code and use the free month and cancel, it will still show as 10 uses in the backend but we made no money and paying the affiliate would be bad news bears.

I also noticed that the coupon code they use does not show on the registration notification from the API tracker as I don’t mind manually sifting through emails if I have to. I’ve also tried exporting the member list as well but it does not show which code they used there or I was just going to sort by join date and then sort by code.

Any thoughts?

#2

Just to be a little more clear with what I meant by a free month through the affiliate…basically they are trialing for 31 days at $0, and then they get charged $10 on the first of the next month. We of course don’t want to pay the affiliate unless that $10 comes in :slight_smile:

#3

It is possible to use “Payment notification” to alarm the affiliate software that the real payment was made. But I can not say exactly URL you need to put there, you should ask the authors of affiliate software to help with this.

#4

I don’t know what relationship s2member and/or WP Sharks has with iDevAffiliate. I don’t want to harm s2member or WP Sharks or iDevAffiliate (they’ve all been very good to me, five stars in a WP environment with way too many poorly supported products). But for those of us just starting out and/or with small businesses that have difficulty affording affiliate tracking software and services, especially those of us who are doing our own heavy lifting with Javascript and PHP – I’m a software engineer; I do all my own stuff – s2member enables us to get the value we need without undue expense.

You don’t need any third party affiliate software. Not only are most hideously expensive – to be fair, iDevAffiliate appears to be the best choice – or unsupported and problematic plugins, they provide no useful product or service. Not for small businesses with small budgets. Worse than that, they limit what you can do, since with their products you can only do what they offer. You can use the Pro Forms messages to send the data to your own home-grown and ridiculously-simple-to-write PHPs. You can save the data to your own tables and/or do whatever you want with it. s2member with Pro-Forms is a great product. You don’t need anything else.

If my company grows, I might find some value in high-priced affiliate trackers that I could afford. For low budget companies, spending $40 per month (or $200 one time, but in my case, I tried iDevAffiliate, but it won’t install on my host) to connect to an $89 plugin doesn’t make much sense. For that price, if you can’t do it yourself, you can hire someone to make a custom system that provides exactly what you need, nothing more nothing less. Complete control. Really, it’s the easiest thing in the world.