Starting an affiliate program to get partners who help you with driving sales and traffic in exchange for a small commission.

What is an Affiliate program?

To build connections and relationships with different parties who will distribute, promote, review and help market your products on multiple platforms in exchange for a fraction of their price.

Businesses use affiliate programs to promote their products with the help of bloggers, YouTubers, publishers, reviewers, etc.

How to Manage Affiliates

First, let’s see how Affiliates register their accounts in your store.

There is a link called Affiliates in the footer of your site. Once clicked, it takes you to the account registration where a candidate can register an affiliate account in your store.
 

Step 1: Creating an Affiliate Account

 

When they click on Continue under New Affiliate, they will see the registration process, which is similar to the normal Customer account creation, with a slight difference.

As not every merchant will use this feature, if you don't have this section in your footer, please contact us to activate it for you.

The Affiliate Information section where they can enter their:

  • Company Name

  • Website URL

  • Tax ID number

  • Preferred Payment Method (Default: Cheque, PayPal, Bank Transfer)
    Take note that all of these methods are done manually, which means your affiliate would need to send in an email to you to request for payout.
    By default, the commission will become "Store Credit" for their account, which they can use to buy products in your store.

 

Once the new affiliate account is created, they will be waiting for you to approve their new account.

That is if you have selected whether new affiliates need to be approved manually or not in your System Settings, but we’ll explain more about that later.
 

Step 2: Approve Affiliate Account

 

Go to your OpenCart admin, then click on Customers > Customer Approvals.

When affiliates register accounts, their entries will appear here, waiting for your approval.

Click the green Approve button.
 

Step 3: Enable Affiliate Account

 

Go to Customers > Customers now and you will see the affiliate account in the customer list. As you notice, it’s disabled.

Click Edit and scroll down.

You will see the last section called Other.

 

Enable the Status and click Save.

Now you can view the Affiliate details by clicking this tab:

 

This is where you can view and manage the Affiliate account details.

Most importantly, you can manage the affiliate tracking code and commission percentage here.

Tracking code: The tracking code generated for each affiliate that will be used to track sales coming from referrals.

Commission: The percentage of the profit that the affiliate receives for each product sold with their help.

 

Affiliate Account Management

Once an affiliate is logged in and go to their Account section, this is what they will see:

  • My Account

  • My Orders

  • My Affiliate Account

  • Newsletter

In the Affiliate Account section, they will have the links to edit their affiliate information and get the details about their tracking code when linking to your products.

 

This is the section where affiliates get the URL they need to place in their websites.

They see their unique Tracking code, and they can generate a link by simply selecting the product they want to sell in the Tracking Link Generator field.

 

Managing General Affiliate Settings

That’s not all. You have additional control over the Affiliate settings in your store.

If you go to System > Settings > Edit your store and click the Option tab, you will find this section by scrolling down:

 

Affiliate Group: You can create a new group dedicated to your affiliates by going to Customers > Customer Groups. Selecting the customer group you create in the field here will mean that each new affiliate will be automatically assigned to it upon registering in your store.

Affiliate Requires Approval: Select Yes if you want to approve new affiliates manually like we did in the tutorial above. Select No if you want them to be approved automatically upon signup.

Automatic Commission: Select Yes if you want the commission to be automatically added to the affiliate’s account each time a sale has been completed.

Affiliate Commission: This is where you configure the default commission value that will be global for your store and applied to all new affiliates. You can control the individual commission of your affiliates from their account management fields in Customers > Customers as we showed above.

Affiliate Terms: Select the Information page containing the terms and conditions that affiliates will need to confirm agreeing in order to create their accounts in your store.