When someone signs up to be an affiliate, the software (which you will install on your web site server) does the following:

1. Creates a web site for the new affiliate (this can either be a dynamically generated site, or a static copy of one or more of your site's pages).

2. Notifies the new affiliate of their affiliate number, password, and web site address

3. Saves the new affiliate's contact information (name, phone, address,etc.) for your future use

4. Sends this same information in an email to the new affiliate.

5. Sends all the new affiliate information to you (the affiliate program owner) in an email

6. If you've enabled the "Member Rewards" system, points will be awarded to the new affiliate's "sponsor" (and once they have enough "points", they can redeem them for whatever prizes you make available).

Once the above process is completed (it takes just seconds), the new affiliate can start advertising immediately!

When an affiliate sends someone to their affiliate URL, a "Cookie" is saved on the visitor's computer. Their IP address is also saved as a "fall-back" in case they have cookies disabled.

If the visitor places an order, your cart system (or whatever order process you're using) will display a "thank you" page for the customer. This page will include an invisible "tracking image" that reports the order information to the affiliate software.

The affiliate is awarded their commission, and an email goes out to them informing them of the commission they've just earned. You receive an email as well.

Note that the affiliate tracking can be implemented in many ways, including SSI, Javascript, PHP, CGI -- we can make it work on just about any system (as long as it's a Unix/Linux web server -- see "Technical Details" for more information).

"Your Own Affiliate Program" also includes a simple order processing application -- if you don't need to process credit cards in "real-time", you can use this for your order processing.

If you use the included order processing application, it will assign the proper commissions to your affiliates and send out the notification emails.

Anytime your affiliates want to, they can look up the "statistics" for their web site, including orders, commissions, how many people visited, and what internet locations those people came from.

Your affiliates can also change their own contact information.

You can look up, modify, and delete all affiliate information. You can also view orders by date and affiliate number.

When it comes time for you to send commission checks to your affiliates, you just print out the commission data for the previous month and send it along with the check! You can also export the commission data, and use this data to create a PayPal "Mass Pay" file.

If you are using "static" affiliate pages, you can update all of them from the control panel

You can also enter adjustments to affiliate commissions (and points, if you've enabled the "Member Rewards" component)