An affiliate is somebody who promotes or sells your products in return for a payment. The web affiliation is a very powerful tool because of the simplicity of linking from one domain to another. An affiliate can shout about the virtues of a product on another website and then link to that product giving his readers a direct link to make a purchase.
That's where the simplicity ends. If we want to reward the affiliate to make sure he keeps sending us great customers then we need to know which customers were sent by him and if they placed an order or not. In addition, how much did they spend? Do they become repeat customers? What merchandising material will our affiliates use? How do they know when our prices change? How does the affiliate know when he has made a sale? How does the affiliate know how much we owe him?
And many more questions besides. Affiliate campaign software abounds but almost all require fairly complex setup and management processes. Integration...