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The Volusion Affiliate System allows merchants to extend their store's marketing reach by partnering with 3rd party individuals to drive traffic to the merchant's online store. Creating and manage affiliates within Volusion is simple. The following article will detail some of the basics of Volusion store affiliate registration and management.

Becoming an Affiliate:

Visitors can follow these simple steps to register with a Volusion store to become a store affiliate:

• Near the bottom of the Volusion storefront, visitors can find the "Become an Affiliate" link.
• Visitors can click on this to begin the affiliate sign up process.
• Visitors will have to log into their Volusion store account in order to complete the affiliate sign up process.
• If visitors do not have a customer account, they will be prompted to create one.
• Once the customer account is created, prospective affiliates will be prompted to enter their website address and a tax ID number (usually either a social security or EIN number), verify the address payments can be made payable to.
• Clicking continue will complete the sign up process for the affiliate - they will receive a notice that their affiliate account will be activated after a 24 hour approval process.

From here, the account is already active as an affiliate, but the message is presented to the "potential affiliate" to give you time to "approve" them. You can review the account in your admin area and choose to keep the Access Key set to Partner/Affiliate or to set back to "Customer". This step is also quite easy.

• Log into the Volusion Admin Page and click on the Customers tab.
• Click on the Accounts link in the menu bar.
• Within the main Customers table, administrators can click on the ID of the customer they wish to promote to affiliate status to edit the account.
• In the customer account settings, the administrator can change the selected Partner / Affiliate from the Access Key drop-down menu and click Save Changes to grant or remove affiliate status.

Example:

Bob's Volusion store, superwidgets.com has an affiliate named Ted Smith. Ted has a popular blog and posts his affiliate link to superwidgets.com within the blog's home page. Anytime a visitor to Ted's blog clicks on that link to visit superwidegets.com and makes a purchase, Ted will receive a percentage of the sale as commission.

More Information:

Once a customer has been made an affiliate, they can log into their customer account at the Volusion store and can click on the "Visit My Affiliate Page" link at the bottom of the page . From here, Affiliates will have access to reports on the number of click-throughs, sales and commission they have generated in their affiliate account as well as up to 4 sub-affiliates that can be registered under them.

Each affiliate's page will also contain a link to enable them to quickly create HTML banner ads that can be posted on web sites and emails (these banner ads will contain links back to the Volusion store plus the affiliates ID information for tracking purposes).

Finally, this page will contain the affiliate's link. This link is the URL of the Volusion store accompanied with the affiliate's ID information. Clicking on this link will redirect visitors to the Volusion store and will record all sales and click-throughs under the affiliate's account. Affiliates will want to copy this URL and embed it as a hypertext link on any websites or in any email/online marketing material they have access to.

Signing up Sub-Affiliates

Volusion store affiliates can actually have affiliates associated with them. These are sub-affiliates - of which there each affiliate can have 4 levels of. The importance of having a sub affiliates is that it allows merchants the ability to distribute affiliate-based marketing across a wide range of individuals.

Signing up to become a sub-affiliate (an affiliate's affiliate) is equally simple to do with Volusion. A prospective sub-affiliate simply needs to visit the Volusion store by clicking on a pre-existing affiliate link. Once they have been redirected to the Volusion store, the prospective sub-affiliate can sign up to become an affiliate with the Volusion store. Once the affiliate sign up process is complete, the visitor will now be an affiliate of the owner of the affiliate link they used to visit the Volusion store.

Example:

From the previous example, imagine Julie, Ted's friend, wishes to become an affiliate with Ted. If Julie visits superwidgets.com using Ted's affiliate link and signs up to be an affiliate there, Julie will then become Ted's sub-affiliate. Julie posts her affiliate link on her MySpace page. Anytime a visitor to Julie's profile who clicks on her affiliate link and places and order at superwidgets.com, both Julie and Ted will now receive a certain percentage of the sale as commission.

Configuring Affiliate Ad Banners

You can configure your online store to offer a variety of banner ad graphics for your store affiliates to use to advertise with. By default, your affiliates will be able to gain access to these banner ads by logging into their affiliate accounts within your store.

Note - some Volusion store templates may not be equipped with any stock banner graphics. You can manually add your own banner graphics easily by uploading these files to your Volusion store via your store FTP account.

Your store's affiliate banner graphics can be uploaded to the following directory within your store: /v/vspfiles/templates/xxx/images/banners/.

Note that you should substitute "XXX" in the directory path above for the number or name assigned to the currently active template in your store. Furthermore, some Volusion stores may not be equipped with the "/banners" directory, in which case, you will be required to create this directory. You can do this using your choice of FTP program.

Your online store will support up to 3 graphic banners for your affiliates. Each banner image file must be a .GIF file type and should be named "banner1.gif, "banner2.gif" and "banner3.gif".

Once your store is configured with your banner ad images, your affiliates can access them from their affiliate account page by clicking on the "Generate Banner Ads" link.

For information on connecting to your Volusion store via FTP, please see the Volusion Knowledge Base for help.

For information on how to remove the affiliate link information from the Volusion store front, please see the following article from Volusion's online Knowledge Base.

Summary:

Having affiliates sign up with a Volusion store allows merchants the ability to extend their marketing to reach more and more customers on the Web. Whether an they have a popular blog or a million friends on MySpace, affiliates can be instrumental in directing traffic to a site and thus, increasing sales. In exchange, affiliates can receive commission on sales they've helped to generate. The affiliate sign up process for a Volusion store is very simple.