I am wondering if there is a way I can create affiliate tracking links that let me know when a user has filled out a form and came from an affiliate site.
Heres my situation...on my site I do not charge fees up front. The client fills out a form then I call them to do a consult before they are chrged anything.
All of the affiliate programs I have found require you to have a payment gateway set up or a shopping cart.
Is there any way around this?
Thank you,
Tim
I don't understand your problem. Usually the link on the affiliate site carries a whole bunch of information as parameters. You can include whatever you need in it (including the referral source - the Affiliate name or number). If you know the url for your Affiliates' sites, you could also use $_SERVER to determine / verify where the transaction came from.
In most cases, Affiliate links aren't tied to an immediate payment. They just bring in traffic to your site and then the person decides if they want to buy or not. It is up to you how you want to handle payment on your site.
If your issue is that you are looking for a program to track Affiliate transactions and then pay them based on sales (which isn't exactly what you said) then you might need a bit of custom back-end code where you log a sale yourself, once you have done your up-front work. If the packages you are looking at force you to configure a payment gateway, you might have to do that and then do some custom work to hide the payment gateway and log the Affiliate info some other way; or, do what I have seen for some giveaways where they require the customer to complete a sale for $0.
Yes, basically I just want to track where customers are linking from so I know which affiliate should get the credit.
I have no idea how to do this.
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