Buyer Details in Affiliate sales table

[docfx]

We’re using estore to take trip reservation deposits and the affiliate plugin to apply commissions for same.

I see that estore captures buyers’ name and email, but I’d also like to get buyer’s name into the affiliate sales table, so affiliates may see both name and email in their sales view. Agent/Affilates know purchasers by name not necessarily email and there is often a long lead time and various details to work out betw deposit and actual travel.

Currently only shows date and commission, although buyer email is captured in sales table. However, there doesn’t seem to be any tie back to the actual sale info.

[amin007]

The affiliate plugin does not show the buyer details to the affiliate because of security reasons. Do you think your buyer wants their details to be given to someone that they don’t even know about? Remember, most of the times your buyers don’t even know that they are following an affiliate link. Does your privacy statement say that buyer details are also available to 3rd party affiliates? It is a common practice to not reveal the buyer details to your affiliates.

With that said, you can show some buyer details (buyer name, buyer email) to your affiliates by enabling it in the settings. It is disabled by default because of the reasons I stated above.

[docfx]

I’m not looking for full buyer info only the name and/or email. I appreciate the security aspect, especially were this an open affiliate system or the commission was coming from sales of a product not attendance to an event.

However, it is a closed agent/affiliate relationship. Our client (booking agent) is creating the affiliate pages, it is not open to anyone. The affiliate landing pages are personalized and assigned to each affiliate.

I (buyer) want to book a trip that I see on the affiliate’s travel site (affiliate could be the resort itself or an independent general travel agent). Chances are VERY high, that buyer and affiliate have already discussed this particular trip/event/excursion and the buyer is interested. A some point later, buyer clicks on the banner advert which takes them to the booking agent’s (our client) site.

The booking agent is not a general travel agent, but has a focus on highly specialized trips/excursions/events. While on the boooking agent site, buyer reserves said trip/event/excursion and via paypal (clearly identified as booking agent), make an initial deposit which then is credited against the appropriate referring affiliate.

The booking agent verifies the buyers information and, if necessary, adjusts final travel arrangements (buyer requests to arrive early, stay late, etc.) AND adjusts the affiliate commissions as needed.

On the other hand, the affiliate, does indeed want to know 1) that a sale occurred that generated commissions and 2) that the buyer (with whom they had discussed said trip) had or was able to reserve said trip.

The sales table can be made to show the buyers email address (which you do store in the affiliate sales table), but that is of marginal value when sandy or joe bob’s email is actually sharkhunter12@gmail.com or stormchaser237@yahoo.com.

The booking agent has no previous discussion w/ sandy/joe-bob, doesn’t know to be looking for them and doesn’t know them UNTIL sale/deposit completion. The agent has no way to easily verify that sandy/joe-bob are being serviced, were able to reserve, except for bugging the booking agent and/or guessing at emails. This somewhat defeats some of the automated nature and leaves a potential hole in the sales channel.

So, yes, in this particular case, buyer name AND email (not full address, not CC info, etc.) would be beneficial to all parties to ensure the buyer doesn’t drop thru a crack somewhere.

[amin007]

Yes, you are correct. However, you are using the affiliate plugin to create a system that wasn’t the design intent. There is no harm in that but it just means that you will need to do custom modification/tweaks to the plugin to adjust it with the scenario that you have setup. You can contact us using the contact form if you want a custom modification done and we can give you a quote.

[docfx]

thanks.

I believe I have a work-around using an existing, but apparently unused field in the affiliate sales table w/o borking it by adding an extra field to the table. I’m simply pushing the buyer name into it from wp-estore, so I only need worry about the two tweaked scripts (one in wp-estore and one in wp-affiliate) if/when they need upgrading.

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