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I am developing an online shop which has managed to agree with other shops to a comission per sale. Now, the problem, is these other shops don't have any kind of affiliate system. So my question is, is there any way we could arrange an easy way for this?

They don't plan to develop anything as they are small shops, so... my only guess right now is to control on my site how many times the links to them have been clicked to have an estimate of potential clients, but don't know how they can know that user came through my site and purchased something.

Thank you very much for your help!

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  • It sounds from your comments below that the items you are promoting are downloadable, is this the case? If they are physical products you could have the entire transaction take place on your site and have your partners drop ship the items.
    – Joshak
    Jun 11, 2013 at 17:18
  • Hi @Joshak and thanks for the interest. The problem with that (as the products are not downloadable) is that then you have to manage all that part and believe me it isn't easy and there are more cons than pros in managing all that transactions and money. We finally chose to go with Analytics with its Ecommerce, although we haven't implemented everything yet. Thanks a lot and hope this can be of use to anyone in the future.
    – Jacobo Polavieja
    Jun 12, 2013 at 17:57

2 Answers 2

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You could use the Google Analytics utmz cookie instead.

What you do is this -

  1. When your customer is converting or making the purchase, check the value of the utmz cookie.
  2. If the traffic source is a referral from your partner site then chalk this transaction to their name.
  3. Create a report that fetches such transactions for each partner

I got this idea from this post. Also dead sure that there is a git of a class that nicely reads and parses the utmz cookie.

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    Hi and thank you for helping. I think I haven't understood what you've said or you gave solution to another problem. There scenario you describe would be perfect if I was the one doing the transactions and had to analyze where that user came from. This case is the complete opposite... I direct customers to online shops and I want to find a way to know if they purchased once out of my site and how much. The best shot right now is setting a goal with that user reaching the "thank you" page of the shop, but that wouldn't give actual info on amount and articles purchased. Thanks a lot!
    – Jacobo Polavieja
    Dec 13, 2012 at 11:28
  • Ohh! so do you have access to the GA Console of those shops? If so, then what you say can be done. Otherwise, if those shops do not have an affiliate management program, you can take a look at e-junkie.com which is at USD 5/mth.
    – Prasad Ajinkya
    Dec 13, 2012 at 12:00
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    Hmmm... I didn't actually though about it that way... Could they set up an Analytics E-commerce account and retrieve all that info? Including the price? As far as I've seen (and understood), the problem with knowing the amounts, articles, etc, is that the cookie for GA E-commerce has to be filled in. As they are reluctant to make much changes, I doubt this could work... or is there any method that can fill in the cookie in a "painless" fashion? Thank you so much for trying to help me @Prasad, I'm pretty stuck with this one. I've already spoken with several companies without luck so far.
    – Jacobo Polavieja
    Dec 13, 2012 at 19:44
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Maybe they could try setting up a conversion goal on Google Analytics and track the amount of visitors you referred that landed on the checkout page?

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  • Thanks a lot @Dejan, this is the only thing I have for now, though I had no idea about conversion goals and I'm reading all I can about them right now. I find it amazing that I can't find any company that manages this for both sides. All I've found is the typical case where the one who sells the final product is the one that has to register and set up the program to offer affiliate links, not the other way round. I'm sorry I can't vote you up since I haven't got the minimum rep. Thanks again.
    – Jacobo Polavieja
    Dec 12, 2012 at 18:29
  • The worst thing about this approach is that we wouldn't have any control over the real sales, right? So if X articles have been sold through us but they tell us it's been just X/2, we would just have to believe them. Business-wise this is really bad... I hope we can find an option. We can ask for some collaboration on their part as long as it is not too intrusive.
    – Jacobo Polavieja
    Dec 12, 2012 at 19:05
  • You can also setup Ecommerce tracking which will give you revenue generated, rather then just goal completions.
    – Joshak
    Jun 11, 2013 at 17:13

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