Introduction

What LiteCommerce Affiliate System module is

In the recent years, affiliate marketing has become an important tool of e-commerce. Thousands of merchants now use affiliate marketing in their business programs. It has proven to be a powerful and cost-effective marketing solution offering great benefits for both an affiliate and a merchant. The affiliate marketing scheme can be simply described as a commission-based arrangement where a referring site receives a commission on sales by merchant. Setting up your own affiliate program, or referral program, helps you to promote your web site and increase your online sales.

Implemented as an add-on, LiteCommerce Affiliate System module is tightly integrated with LiteCommerce software bringing a feature rich affiliate marketing mechanism into your LiteCommerce-driven online store. Now you do not have to employ affiliate management service providers or set up third-party affiliate tracking software and integrate it with your shopping cart - once you install the Affiliate System module and assign affiliate plans to your partners, LiteCommerce automatically tracks all customers and their orders coming from the partners' sites and calculates partners' commissions.

How Affiliate System module works

After the module is installed, the store administrator configures the basic module's settings, defines affiliate plans, adds banners to be used by partners and sets up the partner registration form. The administrator also defines and changes commission rates and other settings, manages partners' participation in affiliate plans and commission payments, and has access to detailed information on referred sales, partners' commission amounts and partners' affiliate trees.

To become a partner, a user has to sign up for an affiliate program. After he is registered for the affiliate program and assigned a certain affiliate plan, he can place your store's banners on his web site or page and start getting commissions for orders placed by customers referred to your store from his web space. A partner can access and choose available store banners, see pertinent commission reports and real-time statistics and update his details in his own partner area.

A partner can establish an affiliate tree of his own by referring new partners to your store. A new partner referred by him becomes his affiliate and the referrer gets a certain percentage from each order placed by a customer referred to the store from his affiliate's web space. An affiliate partner in his turn can also have affiliates of his own. The scheme of commission tiers is fully customizable by the administrator.

This manual will guide you through Affiliate System add-on module installation and setup, describe maintenance procedures and proposed usage patterns.