The website replication feature is a powerful marketing tool that automatically creates personal version of your sales pages or even your entire shopping cart. To use this feature you will first have to prepare your web pages for replication:
| 1. | Create a subdirectory of your AShop on the server. For example, if your AShop is located in the public_html directory on your website you could add a new subdirectory called "salesletter" inside the public_html directory. If your AShop is located one step further down, for example in public_html/shop, you would put the new subdirectory inside that directory instead, for example: public_html/shop/salesletter |
| 2. | Add a .htaccess file in your new subdirectory, if you are on a Linux/Unix server, or use the URL Rewrite module if you are on a Windows server. The .htaccess should contain the following lines: |
Options +FollowSymLinks
Options +Indexes
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/?([^/]+)?/?$ ../view.php?$1&salesletter/$2 [NC,L]
Where "salesletter" should be replaced with the actual name of your subdirectory. The URL Rewrite modul has a tool to import this code, but you do not need to add any .htaccess file if you are on a Windows server, unless it runs Apache as its web server software.
| 3. | Add placeholder codes to your pages, which will be replaced with the affiliate's own information when a visitor views the pages through the affiliate's link. Each code is a HTML comment tag with a corresponding end code. You can place default content between the start code and end code. For example: |
<!-- AShop_affiliate_firstname -->Firstname<!-- /AShop_affiliate_firstname -->
Which would be seen as just "Firstname" on the page by a visitor, unless the visitor arrived through an affiliate link where the "Firstname" text will be replaced with the actual first name of the affiliate.
These are the available placeholder codes that you can use for website replication:
Start tag: |
End tag: |
Replaced with: |
<!-- AShop_affiliate_firstname --> |
<!-- /AShop_affiliate_firstname --> |
First name of the affiliate |
<!-- AShop_affiliate_lastname --> |
<!-- /AShop_affiliate_lastname --> |
Last name |
<!-- AShop_affiliate_user --> |
<!-- /AShop_affiliate_user --> |
The affiliate's username |
<!-- AShop_affiliate_business --> |
<!-- /AShop_affiliate_business --> |
The name of the affiliate's business, if any |
<!-- AShop_affiliate_email --> |
<!-- /AShop_affiliate_email --> |
Email address |
<!-- AShop_affiliate_paypalid --> |
<!-- /AShop_affiliate_paypalid --> |
The affiliate's PayPal ID |
<!-- AShop_affiliate_address --> |
<!-- /AShop_affiliate_address --> |
Street address |
<!-- AShop_affiliate_state --> |
<!-- /AShop_affiliate_state --> |
State/Province |
<!-- AShop_affiliate_zip --> |
<!-- /AShop_affiliate_zip --> |
Zip/Postal code |
<!-- AShop_affiliate_city --> |
<!-- /AShop_affiliate_city --> |
City |
<!-- AShop_affiliate_country --> |
<!-- /AShop_affiliate_country --> |
Country |
<!-- AShop_affiliate_signedup --> |
<!-- /AShop_affiliate_signedup --> |
The date the affiliate signed up |
<!-- AShop_affiliate_url --> |
<!-- /AShop_affiliate_url --> |
The URL to the affiliate's website |
<!-- AShop_affiliate_phone --> |
<!-- /AShop_affiliate_phone --> |
Phone number |
<!-- AShop_affiliate_referralcode --> |
<!-- /AShop_affiliate_referralcode --> |
The affiliate's manual referral code |
<!-- AShop_affiliate_extrainfo --> |
<!-- /AShop_affiliate_extrainfo --> |
Additional information provided by the affiliate |
These can be used both in your own web pages, if you put them in a subdirectory along with a .htaccess file as described above, and in your AShop templates, which makes it possible to personalize content on the shopping cart pages, for example to show the customer how to contact the person who referred them.
In addition to the above codes you can also define an unlimited number of your own codes, to let your affiliate provide their own Facebook ID, MySpace URL, fax number, custom page header or any other kind of content that can be added to a web page. These are entered by the affiliate on the Change Profile page in the affiliate area.
| 1. | Login to your AShop administration panel and open the page Affiliates->Custom Tags. |
| 2. | Enter the name of the new tag, which is what the affiliate will see on the Change Profile page, into the box "Field name" |
| 3. | Enter the tag text of the new tag into the box "HTML tag". AShop will automatically add the text "<!-- AShop_affiliate_" to the beginning and "-->" to the end of your tag. |
| 4. | Enter the number of rows of text that the affiliate should enter for this custom tag. |
| 5. | Click "Add" to create the new custom tag. |
In the example "Biography" above, the affiliate can now provide a personal biography text of three lines and you can automatically place this text on your pages by using the codes <!-- AShop_affiliate_biography --> and <!-- /AShop_affiliate_extrainfo -->.
Link codes
Once you have prepared a website or sales page for use with the replication, you should make sure your affiliates find it and know how to use it. This is done by adding a link code.
| 1. | Open the page Affiliates->Link Codes in your AShop administration panel. |
| 2. | Enter just a URL into the "URL" box and leave the other fields empty. The URL should look something like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/salesletter/%affiliateuser%/page.html where the first part should be replaced with the actual URL to your AShop, the "salesletter" part replaced with the name of the subdirectory you created before and the "page.html" part replaced with the actual name of your page. |
| 3. | Click "Add" to save the new link code. |
The link will now show up on the page Link Codes in the affiliate area and will be automatically converted into the personal link for each affiliate, which they can copy and paste into their own websites, newsletters or printed material. When a customer visits the link, the page will be personalized for the corresponding affiliate.