X-Cart forums

[GreatLakesVacuum]

Hello everyone... question:

We sell B2B and want to make it so when a new company signs up they can fill in a field for who referred them to us (as we have some outside sales reps that would receive credit for orders placed by companies that they refer to us).

How do I do this? I know I can add a field and it will add it to the profile screen ... which hopefully then people will fill out. I shouldn't need to add it to their orders as they should only have to fill it out once. (And we can go put it in for the few that are already in our system without it).


But when a customer that has this field filled out, I would like for it to email the outside sales rep a copy of the order too (so that they know it was placed and for how much).

Would I need to add 2 fields? Or could it be possible they pick from a drop-down list of our outside sales reps? How would we then associate an email address with each rep for them to receive the orders at?

I want all of this to be automated as much as possible so that they (the outside reps) feel like they can trust this new setup.

Thanks for any insights, answers, or quotes to do this.

Nick

[cflsystems]

You can add them as affiliates/partners and have customers select at checkout who referred them ... trying to make customer to fill out name and email on their own will most likely fail - customer may not want to do it, or not knowing email or fill it in incorrectly... You can setup these partnet with or without commission

[GreatLakesVacuum]

Wow, the Affiliate module does all that, eh? I thought it was all just for banner stuff. So this is very close to what we want.

Can I completely disable the banner stuff (for now)?

And so now when a customer checks out they have to remember to type in the user number of the affiliate account? That seems bad... any way to make it so that it is automatically filled in for their account? Or maybe at least a drop down available where we can list the affiliate company by name instead of a random number?

[cflsystems]

Yes it does show as a text box only, not very user friendly.... It can be made so it shows dropdown list of all partners and customer can select if they want to but it has to be custom coded, requires some php script cahnegs and of course template changes

I did this for a client once, worked ok

You don't have to have banners. You don't even have to setup commission or you can set it at 0. Not sure if they get an email with each order though - it mauy need cusotm coding as well

[GreatLakesVacuum]

It appears the affiliate only gets emails about their account (creation/update/approval, etc) and not about orders placed through them.

The drop-down currently would be a list of user numbers which is not much better than typing them in.

What we want to do is NOT allow most of our customers an easy way of giving credit to the affiliate when they shouldn't be (as we would be throwing money away).

Is it possible to somehow have it basically "automatically filled in" for specific users and then they could obviously remove it to not give credit if and when they chose to. I would of course have to go fill it in for the few customers we have right now that *should* have the box filled in.

Thanks for the info on banners, it doesn't look like it is a problem, just extra tabs of useless info until I set it up.

Really it would be nice if the customer referred to the affiliate by its company name. All of our affiliate accounts are businesses not individuals...in fact they really don't even need a first name, last name (but those are ok) and especially do not need a SSN (would like to flat out remove that as it is even a required field). Tax ID number I am on the fence about as I dont think we would be paying them THROUGH x-cart.

Any further input or suggestions?

How would you implement this then to not have it show up in a way that non affiliate customers would not be seeing it as something they need to fill out or select (wrongfully giving the affiliate company commission).

[GreatLakesVacuum]

I should have mentioned I am open to both your ideas and your quote for implementing said ideas

[cflsystems]

The dropdown can show names associated with the userid, it just have to be queried that way.
How do you want to auto fill out an affiliate for a customer? That means you have to have customer-affiliate connection and to allow for multiple of both as one cusotmer can have multiple affiliates they hear things from and same applies to affiiliates -they can have multiple cusotmers... This will require a whole new logic to be coded form scratch for something like this to work...

[GreatLakesVacuum]

Ok on the drop-down.

Our customers don't pick their affiliates...the affiliates refer them to us... so a customer is only associated with at most one affiliate. You are right that an affiliate could be associated with multiple customers though.

I guess maybe we would rather just have the affiliate linked to the customer than the order(s).

For example:

We have a company that buys through us for other companies, call them Stanley. Stanley is now an affiliate... they currently order from us and have us drop-ship to their customer and they sell at the same price we do but we give Stanley a 20% discount. This means Stanley pays us and their customer then pays them.

Then we started selling parts online... now some of Stanley's customers have ordered directly online from us... which means we received the payment immediately. Stanley is unhappy about this and wants a piece of it. After extensive discussions a compromise was made that they would get a cut of orders placed by customers that were already customers of theirs (and that they told us about ahead of time) but it would only be 10% as we are doing all the work and they (Stanley) are doing nothing.

So basically I am looking for a way to get Stanley their 10% when a customer account that is a customer of theirs orders from us online.

[cflsystems]

That would be a customer entering Stanley as affiliate on the checkout page and you setup Stanley as affiliate with 10% commission. If you do not want customers to have control over this it has to be custom coded in customer account who is their affiliate and then auto pass this to the order at checkout - maybe giving the customer a choice with a checkbox to use or not the affiliate but not allowing them to change who that is

[GreatLakesVacuum]

That is exactly what we want... we pick who their affiliate is... they can decide to use it or not.

Is this something you could either tell me how to do or if it is more than you think I can handle, are you willing to quote the customization?

PS: Maybe even better you could write it as something that can be patched (nothing about my customer accounts or checkout has changed from default) and then that way I have the patch in the future also? Let me know.