Has anyone here used LinkShare's affiliate program?

[Andrew Greaves]

And if so is there a way to automate it with shopsite directly, or is a
seperate manual feed necessary?

Thanks everyone.

Andrew

[loren_d_c]

Andrew,

I've integrated a ShopSite with Linkshare before. It gets pretty involved,
but basically I had to write my own cgi to set a cookie when the shopper
came through the LinkShare link, then I used the ShopSite Pro Order API to
read the cookie and write the text file that gets sent to LinkShare every
night. Then you have to setup a nightly cron job that runs LinkShare's
utility that sends the file.

The hardest/most annoying thing about it was that LinkShare also requires
that you have a system to do returns (so that if a product gets returned
you don't have to pay the referral fee for that amount). And instead of
having it on their server so that you can just login to your account there
and do a return, you have to write your own system to do basically a
duplicate transaction but with a negative amount. This doubled the
complexity of the project because the easiest way to do that was to also
insert the transactions into a database so that when you needed to do a
reverse you could do a lookup and create the reverse transaction, and then
there had to be a UI for that, too, so that a merchant could do it. The
'returns' part of the project took up most of the time in the project, and
a vast majority of the code that had to be written was for this part.

I did it all in Perl, it required the CGI perl module (which is pretty
standard with all Perl installations) and two other modules I had to
install, a Date module (to do some time calculations) and a DBI module (for
the database integration). The particular database used was PostgreSQL, but
DBI also has routines for MySQL and others.

In fact, the sample code that I posted for the newgroup thread "Re: How To:
Getting your orders into MySQL in realtime" was a part of this project, so
you can see in that sample what kind of information has to be recorded to
send to LinkShare for each order.

-Loren


Andrew Greaves wrote:

And if so is there a way to automate it with shopsite directly, or is a
seperate manual feed necessary?

Thanks everyone.

Andrew