Integration is a way to connect the affiliate system to your current website, shopping cart or payment gateway in a way that the affiliate system will be notified about referrals and purchases.
When being notified, the affiliate system registers the click, sale, lead or any other web action, finds the affiliate who referred the particular click/sale/lead/action and creates appropriate commission for referring affiliate. This is one of the most important steps of your setting up and you really want to pay attention to it and set it up correctly.
First it might be useful to see how tracking works in our software.
Integration usually means adding few lines of tracking code into your pages. We created a list of all possible integration guides for most common shopping carts and payment systems.
Integration is necessary for correct operation of the affiliate program, so make sure your affiliate system tracks your clicks, sales and/or leads after you are done as explained in the next step of the setting up the system guides.
You can find more help concerning the integration in your merchant panel in the Tools > Integration section.
There are two integration steps:
Clicks tracking
Clicks tracking integration is required so that the affiliate system properly tracks the referrals.
What is a referral? => When a visitor clicks any affiliate link or banner and gets to your site. Then the visitor is referred by that particular affiliate.
Adding the actual click tracking code is required in case you have decided to use either New Style, Anchor or DirectLink type of referral liks for your program, all 3 methods can be used together by your affiliates but the default one can be only one, we vote for Anchor links and that is why these are set as default in your program from the beginning. On the other hand if you have chosen Mod_Rewrite or Standard/Redirect links then you should skip click tracking code integration since the code would be conflicting with these linking methods. If you haven't yet chosen the linking method then read about each of them here and chose one.
You need to integrate click tracking code, because first of all you need to track click, than you can track sale (click tracking code creates tracking cookie which is than used for sale tracking).
If you would be interested you can read more details about the actual click tracking code and its advanced options here Clicks JavaScript tracking code.
Sales / Leads tracking
this is an integration with your shopping cart or payment gateway system so the system can create the actual commissions for referred orders. The integration method differs depending on the shopping cart you use. You can find all supported methods in the Tools > Integration > Sales / Leads tracking section of your merchant panel.The list of all the integration methods can also be found on our addons page, but please note that the codes here are just example codes and they don't contain correct URL to your Post Affiliate Pro installation, so you should always get the correct codes from your actual merchant panel.
If you can't find your shopping cart in the list of supported methods and you have some programmer at your disposal then try to use the General solution method. If your shop or payment process contains some "thank you for order" or "order confirmation" page, and you can edit it's contents, then you should be able to use the General solution method. Simply add the Sale JavaScript tracking code to this page, use the variables of your shopping cart concerning the Total Cost and Order Id and it is done.
Alternatively, you can contact us and request the full integration service https://www.postaffiliatepro.com/services/integration/ and if your shopping cart isn't encoded we should be able to create a dedicated integration method for you and your shopping cart.
Continue to the next step of setting - 10. Test everything