Looking for some advice

[cjohnston]

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Hi there and thanks for stopping buy. Hope I'm in the best forum for this but have noticed a lot of unanswered treads.

Basically I have had an idea for a website for some time and until now I have nothing about it. The site would involve cashback&voucher type scripting with the ability to take product feeds etc from various merchants.
I belive this is a site that would have the potential to go virial.
My problem is this.
I am new to all of this. I know what can be done with these sites in terms of functionality and admin reporting up to the point of the actual tracking of: payments, products purchases etc. I just don’t know how to do it. I am currently working on a requirements cataleogue which I intent to give to a developer/coder.

I can manage with the most of my requirements as I have a fair idea of what can be done. However when it comes to the cashback/points, tracking of sales and processing to members ect side of things I’m at a bit of a loss as I don’t really know how this side of things works with regards to reporting from the merchants (I have never saw a report before). I was wondering if anyone that does have a bit of experience could posibly give me a bit of guidance on what I would need to be including in my requirements. The same would apply for taking product feeds from merchants.
I Guess if I had a better understanding of how this is tracked and what fields are included in reports from Merchants I could figure it out to a certain point.
How does a sale go from pending to complete to cashback awarded and how can this be automated?

Any advice on what I should be looking out for here would be welcomed.

Kind Regards.

[D-Mac]

Hi

With regard to cashback, most networks enable you to download your commission reports as XML without having to manually login. This means that an automated script can be run on your server to connect to the networks' servers and import the commission data into your database.

You can then automatically match up each commission against the visitor who is owed a cashback. This is done by including the visitor/members ID in the affiliate link, and is then reported back to you in the imported reports.

I hope this helps.