Return To The uShop Reference Site



1. Cookies and Affiliate Tracking

uShop's affiliate tracking system works by having any links to your store from affiliates set an "affiliate" cookie. This "affiliate" cookie will get set to a value based on each affiliate's unique ID (the unique ID that was assigned to the affiliate when he/she signed up to become an affiliate). The "affiliate" cookie will last on the visitor's browser for 7 days.... and therefore, if the visitor puchases anything from your store within those 7 days, then the referring affiliate will get the proper credit for the sale.


2. Standard Affiliate Linking

As specified in the uShopTM User's Guide, the standard way to have an affiliate link to your store, is to have the affiliate link to the URL of the "ushop.pl" script on your public server, such as:

http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/ushop.pl?id=AID&url=YOURURL

Note that at the end of the "ushop.pl" script URL, there are two special parameters that are also passed - the id parameter and the url parameter. The id is used to specify the affiliate's ID and the url specifies the URL of your website. For example, this following link will set the affiliate cookie to "TEST" and then link you to the main page of our www.uburst.com website:

http://www.uburst.com/cgi-bin/ushop/ushop.pl?id=TEST&url=http://www.uburst.com/


3. Possible Problem With The Standard Affiliate Linking Process

The standard way of linking affiliates to your store (as described in the previous section) will only work if you have your own secure certificate for your site. That is, you must be able to refer to the your "ushop.pl" script via the URL's:

http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/ushop.pl?id=AID&url=YOURURL

and

https://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/ushop.pl?id=AID&url=YOURURL

Note that the www.yourdomain.com domain name is identical for both the public and secure URL. The reason this must be the same is because the affiliate cookie that gets set by linking to your public URL must be accessible during the secure order process... and as part of the standard cookie protocol, cookies can only be read by the same domain that set the cookie. That is, if the domain of your public URL is not the same as the domain of your secure URL, then the secure uShop CGI script will not have permission to read the affiliate cookie.


4. Solution To The Affiliate Linking Problem

To get around the problem described in the previous section, we have provided the uShopTM cookies.pl script which will handle setting and reading the cookies on your public server....before customers are even transferred to your secure server. That is, the cookies.pl script will allow you to successfully read/set affiliate cookies.... even if your public and secure domains are different.


5. Installation Of The uShopTM cookies.pl Script

The cookies.pl script is actually a very basic Perl script and should install very easily on your server. To install the cookies.pl script:
  1. Specify your server's "path to perl" as the very first line of the script.


  2. Transfer the script to your public server in ASCII or TEXT mode.


  3. Give the script read/execute permissions (chmod 755).

6. Linking To The uShopTM cookies.pl Script

Linking to the uShopTM cookies.pl script is very similar to linking to the "ushop.pl" script:

http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/cookies.pl?id=AID&url=YOURURL

Note again that at the end of the "cookies.pl" script URL, there are two special parameters that are also passed - the id parameter and the url parameter. The id is used to specify the affiliate's ID and the url specifies the URL of your website. For example, this following link will set the affiliate cookie to "TEST" and then link you to the main page of our www.uburst.com website:

http://www.uburst.com/cgi-bin/ushop/cookies.pl?id=TEST&url=http://www.uburst.com/

Note that this is identical to how you would link to the ushop.pl script on your public server - except you are linking to the public URL of your cookies.pl script instead.


7. No Cookies Being Set?

On the rare occasion, some servers may prevent cookies from being set when a URL redirection is also being performed. That is, if you find that the URL:

http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/cookies.pl?id=AID&url=YOURURL

... is not setting the affiliate cookie before redirecting the visitor to the specified url, you may need to omit the url portion of that link and instead use an IMG SRC to call the cookies.pl script. For example, the following 2 lines of HTML could be placed on the affiliate's website to set the affiliate cookie and then link visitors to your store without the URL redirection:

<IMG SRC="http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/ushop/cookies.pl?id=TEST" BORDER=0 WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1>
<A HREF="http://www.yourdomain.com">http://www.yourdomain.com</A>

Note that the second line used to link to your website can actually be any type of HTML link - such banner image as in the example below:

<IMG SRC="http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/ushop/cookies.pl?id=TEST" BORDER=0 WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1>
<A HREF="http://www.yourdomain.com"><IMG SRC="http://www.yourdomain.com/images/yourbanner.gif"></A>


8. One Final Note

One last thing to point out is that in regard to setting the "affiliate" cookie, the above discussion also applies to setting the "coupon" cookie. That is, as specified in the User's Guide, customers may be linked to your site via "coupon" links, such as:

http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/ushop.pl?coupon=COUPONID&url=YOURURL

... Where a coupon parameter is specified instead of - or in addition to - the affiliate id parameter. Coupon links work the same way as affiliate links in that they must set a "coupon" cookie, therefore the above "cookie.pl" solutions also apply to "coupon" cookies.