how does cashback tracking systems work?

[godsakes]

I don't come from a technical background so I've always been puzzled how some sites were designed.

in particular these cashback sites (such as greasypalm & quidco) which reward their members a portion of their affiliate earnings - how on earth do they manage to track each indivdual member's orders and earnings???

[pricethat]

Sub id tracking, is nothing special, just add a parameter to the urls or deeplinks as they are called like subid=YOUR_CUSTOMER_ID_HERE and then the network stores that against the session or cookie and relates the sale to the member.

Each network has a different name for this parameter. If you want to get real techy some systems have their own tracking url which some networks will call to pass the data directly to the cashback site as well but i only know of one network personally in the uk that does this. Affiliate future i believe but they all let you download stats with the ids manually anyway so its just a case of pairing them up either by hand or with an import system.

Matt

[mallyord]

Do you know anyone who sell these scripts to use?

lisa