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Affiliate marketing with TourCMS

Affiliate marketing is where you create a wide team of individuals, partners, agents and others to promote your product. Ideas for affilates include the local hotel who is near where you run your tours, a trip planning guide etc

Pre-requisites

Add a TourCMS booking engine to your website (so that the tracking will work)
Turn on your TourCMS Marketplace listing (including adding company details, product images, descriptions, dates, prices etc)
Add an affiliate (Marketplace partner) sign up form to your website (making it easy for new affiliates to sign up on your site) (Instructions below)
In Configuration & Setup, Agents section, set up a DEFAULT agent/affiliate commission scheme (otherwise all new agent records will be created with no commission scheme set and you will have to go through manually all your agent records assigning correct commission settings)
You may also wish to put a TourCMS Marketplace agent/affiliate login on your own website (so they login via you) but this is not mandatory. See instructions (2nd example down)
Every time someone approaches you to market your products, ask them to sign up as an affiliate via your website!
Add a page on your website with a prominent link called Affiliates. People who know about affiliate marketing will find it. On that page explain what kind of products you have, your average commission and place the sign up form there.

The process

When someone completes the affiliate/agent sign up form on your website

A TourCMS Marketplace partner account is created (and they will be emailed their login details)
You will receive an email with their details - in that email is an invitation to connect. If you connect to them (just like a normal TourCMS Marketplace connection) then they will be able to feature your products, see bookings etc
If you choose to connect to them, they will then receive another email with instructions

Commission

An agent / affiliate can use central commission billing (TourCMS will collect commission from you and send to the agent/affiliate) - or you can setup each affiliate to have commission, as per these agent commission setup instructions

Trade agents where they collect the balance from the customer and you invoice the agents can also use the same functionality (but not the central commission billing service offered by TourCMS).

Parameter	Notes
partner_name	Agent/Affiliate name
email	Email address (will be used as login username)
short_desc	1 line short description (Max 150)
web_address	Web address (Max 250)
return_url_success	URL of page to redirect to if the sign up was successful
return_url_failure	URL of page to redirect to if the sign up failed. The paramater message will contain a message that can be shown to the user to explain the failure reason
channel_id	Channel ID. Set this to a channel/website ID that you wish the new agent/affiliate to be linked to, once they have signed up. You can find your channel ID from within the supplier side of the Marketplace, on the left hand side

Submit the form to https://admin.tourcms.com/partner/partner_signup/partner_new_action.php as a POST

e.g. this HTML

<style>
label{

display:block;
	float:left;
	width:150px;
	text-align:right;
	margin:7px 5px 0px 0px;
	padding-right: 20px;
}

</style>

<form method="post" action="https://admin.tourcms.com/partner/partner_signup/partner_new_action.php" style="width:75%">
<fieldset><legend>Sign up for an agent/affiliate account from TourCMS</legend>
<label for="partner_name">Agent/affiliate name</label>
<input type="text" name="partner_name" value="" maxlength="80" /><br />
<label for="email">Email address</label>
<input type="text" name="email" value="" maxlength="250"/ >
<br />
<label for="short_desc">Describe your company</label>
<input type="text" name="short_desc" value="" maxlength="150" />
<br />
<label for="web_address">Web address http://</label>
<input type="text" name="web_address" value="" maxlength="150" />

... creates this (working) form....

You MUST change

Don't forget to set channel_id in your form though! (as a hidden field) otherwise a new agent/affiliate account will be created, but it won't be linked to your website channel

Also set return_url_failure and return_url_success to the page on your website where your form is embedded (or another page with specific instructions, if you wish)

Affiliate marketing with TourCMS

Pre-requisites

The process

Commission

You *MUST* change

You MUST change