Hello, On 05/12/2002 08:54 AM, Randum Ian wrote: > Hi all, > > I am in the middle of writing a website for affiliate programs on the web, > which one is the best and why kind of thing. I would like to be able to do > something similar to what Amazon do on their website but I am struggling to > work out how they do it so convincingly. Here is an example of what I mean: > > When you select an item to look at, there is a section named: > > <snip> > Customers who bought this item also bought: > > blah link one - blah description > blah link two - blah description > > Click here for more blah > <snip> > > How is this done? Is there a reference to a new db which has the links and > references them from there or do they look into sessions or cookies?
Amazon keeps track of the referral id in the URL itself. When the person purchases a product, Amazon takes note of the referral id taken from the current page URL. It works well because it survives bookmarks unlike cookies, so if people bookmark a page and comeback to it later the referral is still earned. Also not everybody is willing to accept cookies so that is bad because many referrals are lost. I have a book reviews section in a site of mine. I gave up all other book stores because unlike Amazon, they were not accounting any referrals. I suppose that is because their referral methods were simply not working because they are not bookmark/cookie proof. The Amazon method is good but it is expensive because to keep of the referral id, all pages in your site have to be dynamically built to embed the referral ids in links and forms. I have implemented a better method in the PHP Classes site. It uses the site URL domain to embed the referral id. So, instead of using something like Amazon does http://www.amazon.com/someurl/referral/id , I use http://id.referraltype.phpclasses.org/someurl . Since I have used either in Apache and the DNS to make any domain *.phpclasses.org be equivalent, I do not have to do any thing to create new referral types or referral ids. I only have to make sure that any links in the site only use the URI part of the pages so the browser uses the same URL domain in consecutive accesses of the users in the pages. Currently I am using this to keep track of referrals of new subscribers that were lead to the site by mirror site hosts. This way I can compute a ranking that shows which are the most active mirrors. This serves as encouragement for mirror hosts to attract more users to each of their mirror sites, where the users will see their banners on the right side of the pages providing some advertising for their services. You may start here picking a mirror site and follow some links there until you are brought back to the main site via a login or subscribe link where the domain of the transforms into something like mirrorid.mirrors.phpclasses.org . http://www.phpclasses.org/mirrors.html Another form of referral is for individual links that point new users to the site. They can use a URL domain like login.users.phpclasses.org to refer to any page in the site so they can be credited for any referrals. This has only been announced to some users because I want to gather a few (10) user referrals. Soon I will announce this to all users showing a top referring users in a chart as a form of recognition for the users contribution to help growing the site user community. -- Regards, Manuel Lemos -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
