How do they do that?

[ChilliBoy]

Hi,

Has anyone got any ideas on how affiliate networks track referral sales?

If so, does anyone have any idea on how you would go about setting up a script, where I could actually track sales on merchants that are linked to from my site?

Of course the easy way is to sign up with affiliates through CJ, BeFree etc, but I'm looking more long term. If its not super complex I may look into it.

Does it require some code alteration on the merchant site?

Cheers

[TWTCommish]

It depends - as you'll likely notice, every affiliate URL has some sort of indentification in the querystring - be it numers, letters, or a combination of the two.

I believe CJ sets a small cookie on your computer and tracks your purchases from there. With PHP, sessions might come in handy for such a task.

Could you go into some more detail?

[ChilliBoy]

Yes, I agree a Cookie probably comes into play somewhere.
Your affiliate link generaly first goes to the affilite sign up company. The 'code' in the url will represent the source site and the site to link to which will then be opened. This is fairly easy to understand.

But how they track any sales I don't know. If its done via cookie how are they sent back to the affiliate company (CJ for example) - I believe a cookie can only be retrieved when the user visits the site that set the cookie - therefore how would CJ get it back?

"Could you go into some more detail?";-

I have no detail, I was just wondering if 'say an ecommerce site approached me, or I approached them' with a view to setting up an affiliate relationship, how could it be done without going through an affiliate company.

[Son Nguyen]

I am not sure, but I believe any affiliate site that use CJ have to implement a tracking system provided by CJ.

[ChilliBoy]

Yes, I think it is the only possible way it could be done.