How do your cashback website work
Сashback website is commission based model for affiliate marketing websites. Owner of affiliate cashback website will get partner's commission and "return" part of this commission to buyer.
You must have some basic knowledge how affiliate marketing works for successful cashback site. We will use next terms in this manual:
1. Advertiser or Merchant - online retailer which promote his products in affiliate network.
2. Publisher or Affiliate - it's you, owner of cashback website.
3. Affiliate network - intermediary between Advertiser and Publisher.
3. User or Customer - buyer which clicks affiliate link on your site and buy products.
1. You must register as publisher in one of supported affiliate networks. Most of them also require to get approve for each merchant which you will promote on your site.
2. Each network has own module in Cashback Tracker plugin. Activate them. Add API keys. Add default percentage of your commission which you will give to buyers. You can also set different value per each merchant.
3. You must add affiliate links on site with any available method (via shop pages, via plugin's shortcodes, via Content egg, Affiliate Egg or custom solutions or theme's functions).
4. Customer must be registered on your site and logged in. Then, he will get special Sub ID which will be added to affiliate link and network will track his orders. It's very important to follow some rules: purchase must be made after clicking on affiliate link on your site, user must have disabled ADS blocker in browser, cookie must be enabled in browser. There are some plugins for wordpress which will show Notice to user that he has ads blocker in browser, you can find them in google.
5. It requires some time when affiliate network tracks purchase and shows it in statistic. Cashback Tracker will check API of network and will load fresh statistic.
Each new purchase will have Pending status. It means that current order is assigned to user. Then, merchant can approve this order or decline it (Approved status and Declined status). Make sure that you understand that merchant can take few weeks before he approve order. It means that you will not have commission and can't pay it before order will get approved status. Usually, we recommend to notice users that they will get cashback in 3-4 weeks after purchase.
6. When status is changing, plugin generates special events. You can use them to make own custom functions if you have code skills. But, we also added special integration with point plugin myCRED which you can use if you don't have code skills.
Tracker plugin will create 3 custom points in myCRED (Pending, Approved, Declined) for each currency. Then, you can use Mycred addons to show statistic to users and edit points. Mycred has good integration in Buddypress (profile and community plugin) and also in many other themes and plugins. Also, most of addons for myCRED is free as well as myCRED plugin.
7. Approved points can be changed to real values. For example, you can sell your real products on site for points, you can restrict access to parts of site based on points of user, you can change points to gift cards or send users money on their Paypal or bank account. Please, note, Cashback Tracker doesn't have any inner forms for automatic payments. You must add request form for users or use one of myCRED addons.
