A customer/user record can be an affiliate if two conditions are met:

1. The 'IsAffiliate' box is checked – the customer can set this by applying to become an affiliate through the 'my account – affiliate referrals' section, or you can set it manually.
   
   
2. The affiliate commission is set above 0% - this can only be done by a store admin on the back end of Kartris. In this way, each affiliate must be manually approved by an admin before their relationship with the store is confirmed and active.

One approved as an affiliate, a user can see their status change in the 'my account – affiliate referrals' section. They are presented with a link such as: http://www.demo.xyz/?af=123

The 123 is the customer/user ID number, and can be passed to the home page.

When a new customer follows an affiliates link to a store powered by Kartris, the store sees the affiliate ID and records this in the customer's session. A 'hit' is also recorded, indicating that the link resulted in a customer visiting the site.

If the new customer goes on to make a sale, two things happen.

Firstly, the new customer's record is permanently tagged as 'belonging' to the affiliate who referred them.

Secondly, the affiliate will be credited with commission for this order, which will be the % of the total value of the order minus shipping, and any discounts.

If a new customer's record was tagged as belonging to a certain affiliate as described above, then if the return at any time in the future to make further orders, the affiliate will receive commission on these too.

If an existing customer who does not belong to any affiliate follows a referral link and subsequently makes a purchase on this visit, they will from that point on 'belong to' the affiliate whose link referred them. The affiliate will receive commission for this sale and any future sales made to the same existing customer.

It is not possible for a customer to 'belong' to multiple affiliates. Therefore, a customer who 'belongs' to a certain affiliate will remain as such regardless of whether they follow any other affiliate's links in future.

The original affiliate will receive any commissions on sales to a customer who they referred originally, even if that customer has followed another affiliate link on subsequent visits.

This is to ensure that affiliates cannot be 'poached' later to deny the original affiliate credit for a customer they referred.

A store owner may have external advertising or links that contribute traffic to his or her site. Advertising networks such as Google Adsense provide fairly detailed information on click-throughs, and even conversions when coupled with Google Analytics. However, sponsored links or forums or blogs may harder to track.

It is therefore possible to use the affiliate system to track such links, but setting up each link as a separate affiliate. This will require either using bogus email addresses, or setting up multiple new addresses. But it will mean that you can then ask your partners to use a specific URL you give them, so all incoming traffic, and the sales generated can be monitored.

Affiliates can view both hits and sales that resulted from their referrals from the 'my account – affiliate referrals' section on the front end.

Store admins can view similar information by going to 'Affiliates > Affiliate Stats'.

Payment information to the affiliate can be viewed from the 'Payments' link from the customer record in the customer listing. This will show the affiliate's total commission earned, and the value of any payments made to them.

Any commissions earned that have not been paid yet will be listed. If you pay a commission (or issue a coupon for it instead, if your terms are to pay commissions as discount coupons instead of as cash), you can check the box next to the commissions paid and click the 'Set as Paid' button. A payment for the total amount will appear below, while the commission records will disappear. If you make a mistake, or cancel a coupon/payment, just select 'Mark as Unpaid', and the commissions will be unpaid again.