An Affiliate system offers other people the opportunity to sell your products for you (by directing people to your website pages) and in return, they get a percentage of the sales you make to people who were referred to your site by them.

You let people promote your products/services for you and give them a percentage of the sale, in return for that promotion. (the higher the percentage, the better.)

Max Affiliates works by assigning a Reference Number to a person who signs up as an affiliate of yours.  Then whenever a customer comes to your site with that Reference Number, it keeps track of the sale.  If you have (say) 20 affiliates and they send 10 customers each to your site who then buy something, then you have 200 sales. The Max Affiliates system keeps track of who bought what, and what affiliate should be credited with each sale.

Then (periodically) you may view reports of how much each affiliate is due, so they may be sent checks.  Basically, Max Affiliates takes care of all the details for you. All you do is let your visitors know that they can sell your products for you. And point them at your Max Affiliates sign-up page.  The system takes care of all the rest.

The purpose of Max Affiliates is two-fold:

1) It assigns a Reference Number to a person who signs up as an affiliate.

2) It displays the Order History database so the affiliate can view the history of who made orders with their Reference Number.

BUT -- and this is an essential point -- it doesn't make entries in the Order History table. Only when a customer makes a purchase does the Order History table get updated. And customers make purchases by using the Max ShopCart shopping cart. The Max Affiliates system is NOT a stand-alone system. It is required to be used in conjunction with Max ShopCart.

On your website, you send people to a page where they can sign-up to be an affiliate.  Anyone who wishes to promote your products/services will need to sign-up for a userid and password.  This gives them a "Reference Number" which they then use in their promotions.

What's a Reference Number?  It's the key to the whole process. By using their Reference Number, it's how they get paid whenever a customer that they refer actually makes a payment.

They would instruct their prospective customer to go to www.yourdomain.com?reference=99 where 99 gets replaced by the Reference Number they get assigned. See more here.

Note: This documentation is meant to be read while you have the Max Affiliate program operating in another window, so you can follow along.

On most pages of the system, you’ll find little graphic symbols next to the elements of the page. These symbols have a question mark and say HELP. By clicking on these HELP buttons, you see a little pop-up screen which gives you some information about what needs to be done, at that point.

Next, we’ll look at the details of how to install the system. If you have had someone else install the system, and configure it for you, and all you want to do is start attracting affiliates, then you can skip right to Starting the Max Affiliates System.