admin buyer checkout current customer day doesn full info intended likely link month months next orders page pay paypal product program purchase removed reset sale seller selling send setting settings site software sold solution thread transaction wanted

Are the cookie 'rules' listed anywhere? So for example, what if one of my affiliates (Affiliate A) directs a person (Jill) to my site for purchase. Jill's cookie is set for Affiliate A. However she doesn't buy anything.
A month later Jill clicks through to my site from Affiliate B.
What happens? Is the cookie reset to Affiliate B?
What if Jill purchases that day - who does the sale go to?

Thanks - if this info/logic is listed somewhere - please tell me where as I couldn't find it!

In the scenario you described, Affiliate B's cookie would clobber the earlier cookie for Affiliate A -- which makes sense if you think about it, since Affiliate A's referral did not generate a sale, whereas Affiliate B's did (suggesting B was probably more effective at marketing your product(s) than A was).

The cookie is set to expire 6 months from the last time the buyer clicks through the affiliate's link, so any purchases they make during the lifetime of that cookie (whether the full 6 months or until the buyer clears their cookies in that browser) will be associated with the referring affiliate.

@E-JunkieGuru

Yes, it makes sense if you put it that way, but let me put another way.

1. Affiliate A recommends product called WidgeTech
2. Bargain-user goes back to Google and searches for "widgetech coupon."
3. Spammer Affiliate B (who has no coupons since none actually exists) creates a page Titled: "WidgeTech Coupon -- 50% Discount!!"
4. Within the page, there is only an affiliate link that reads "Click here to get discount"
5. User clicks and gets directed to vendor
6. Honest affiliate A's cookie is deleted.

How sad.

On the other hand, the scenario you described doesn't necessarily mean that the last affiliate is the one who sold the product. We all know that selling something often requires follow-ups and reading second opinions.

Affiliate A is the one who introduced the product to the buyer. It's very likely that the buyer found Affiliate B only as a result of Affiliate A's recommendation -- or the buyer only followed B's link as a result of A earlier influence.

Yes, there are all sorts of unusual scenarios one might imagine, and what you described could work the other way as well, where Affiliate A promises a discount that doesn't exist, so the buyer declines to purchase when they see they aren't getting any discount, or imagine that Affiliate A completely misrepresents the product, so the buyer does not purchase once they click through and see that it's not what they wanted at that point, but then sometime later Affiliate B markets the product to that same buyer accurately and appealingly and reintroduces the buyer to it in a context favorable enough to entice them to make a purchase.

At any rate, we can't have it both ways and had to decide which way the system would work, so we went with the most common, likely scenarios that would benefit most affiliates acting in good faith, which also happened to be the simplest solution from a software standpoint, and so that's the way it is.

So, does inputing the IPN in Paypal still worthless because I just did and I just found this thread and now see that it was pointless? You guys never deleted that set IPN line in the Seller admin. As a customer I will assume that I have to put it in or my transactions won't count.

We send our IPN requirements to PayPal with every checkout, and those would override any manual IPN settings in your PayPal account for that transaction. The obsolete IPN setting we recommended in our Affiliate program setup instructions would have no relation to our system processing orders for you and tracking any affiliate commissions earned if you set up an affiliate program. We had intended that IPN setting only to notify us when merchants actually pay out commission earnings to their affiliates, but in practice that did not work out as intended, so that instruction has been removed in the next version of Seller Admin we've been working on. Our current Flash-based Seller Admin has become so complex that modifying anything at all in it tends to break things in unexpected ways, so we're just leaving it well enough alone until its DHTML-based replacement is ready for primetime.