Hi all! This entry will cover off the following topics:
1. Adding previously referred shops to your affiliate account
2. Shopify Banners
3. Using your Affiliate Token
If there are any other burning issues you’d like addressed, please let me know and I’ll do my best to answer them in a future entry.
1. Adding previously referred shops to your affiliate account
By now you all should have received your email confirming you as part of the affiliate program. Many of you have also requested to have shops you’ve previously brought to Shopify added to your account. If there are any more of these requests, I’ll be happy to accommodate them, just drop me a line, telling me the URL of the shop you’d like added.
If you ask to have a specific store affiliated with your account, I will confirm that the shop is not owned by you or your company (as this is a violation of the terms of service). Most of the time this is easy for me to check through our admin interface. However, if you are signed up as the store owner, I’ll be double checking with you to confirm ownership. Often, the designer will create the store and do the design work under their own name, and at launch time transfer ownership to the client. You simply need to ensure that down the line the client is associated with this account, or eventually the system will choke on paying you out affiliate transactions.
2. Shopify Banners
If you’re interested in putting a Shopify banner on your site, we have several available here. If there are any specific banners or badges that you think would be valuable, drop me a line and let me know.
3. Using your Affiliate Token
Your affiliate token is the link that you need to sign your clients up under to have the store automatically associated with your account. When you log in to the affiliate portal, you can view your token by clicking on the “affiliate token” button. You’ll see the following text (replacing “shannon” with your handle):
The first link is the one you’d use if you’re simply creating a link from your website to ours, or if you want a client to check out the Shopify website. The second one is the one where you or the client would directly sign up for an account.
Once the link is clicked, your affiliate token is valid for 7 days. So if someone clicks on the link to access Shopify through your token, then return to shopify.info and sign up within 7 days, you’ll automatically get the affiliate relationship with that client. However, tokens can be overwritten – as in, if a client clicks on your token, then clicks on someone else’s and signs up, the last token to refer will get the affiliation. If you suspect something parasitical’s happening, as in someone is intercepting your clicks and replacing them with their own token, please let me know immediately. We will do our utmost to quash those kinds of shenanigans immediately.
Please let me know if you have any questions on the affiliate system. Til then, happy shopifying!
Shannon