Accepting Payment for a physical product - paypal?

[ebtek]

I am starting to sell physical products and have a few questions.

I want to be able to support offline affiliates and track the sales they drive.

At a high level Im thinking I can create a coupon that will allow the buyer to save a certain percentage off the sale, giving them the incentive to use the coupon given to them by my affiliate, and giving my affiliate confidence that they will be compensated for their efforts.

What is the best/easiest/cheapest way to integrate a sales page into a wordpress site (worst case scenerio it doesnt integrate, it just passes them to another (merchant services) page), where they can enter a coupon and/or notes such as who referred them etc.

its late and im trying to quit coffee so if i missed anything or this doesnt make sense, forgive me, but i think you get the jist of what im looking to do.

 

[Fatbat]

Affiliate tracking and an ecommerce platform are two different things. Typically you would use an open source package like Magento, Zen, Prestashop, OS and integrate it into your site. Some are better than others for integrating into Wordpress.

Then you would use a proprietary or third party, hosted or self hosted affiliate management/tracking solution separate from that to manage that side of your business. Some examples would be idevdirect, PostAffiliatePro, ClickInc.com and Has Offers. You either buy a copy of the software, in the case of idev or Post, and host it yourself on your own server and implement the tracking on your order confirmation page or use a hosted version like ClickInc or Has Offers and do the same with the tracking.

Of course you could also sign up with some of the networks and have them manage a lot of the affiliate side of your business, you just need to put their tracking in place on the order confirmation page of the buying process and give them a budget to work with.

These are but just a small number of the carts and affiliate software out there. There are lots of different solutions. Personally I use Magento and ClickInc.com and am on ShareASale as well. I'm sure others here will have some better input about what is good for Wordpress integration.

 

[ebtek]

...

thanks for the info, i will check out the products you've mentioned, and i apologize in advance if those products make the following questions moot.

i plan on promoting this offline, so hypothetically take one of those suppliments guys with their own product. they walk in to GNC and work out a deal with the sales guy, and get him to (subtlety) sell/mention his product to customers. he gives them a website address to guy buy it.

now, you could do this a few ways (in order to track leads/sales):
1. give them a website with... .com?affid=12345 at the end
2. create individual domains for every offline salesperson you have, something easy to remember
3. give them a unique id they can enter on the order page - why would they bother to do this unless theres some monetary incentive.

thats the only way i can think of to track affiliates - through the order page