Checkout: Shareasale.com

With the WordPress Shopping Cart plugin, the Affiliates Tracking extension plugin and a Shareasale.com merchant account, you can track sales through your WordPress website with the Shopping Cart plugin to award commission to affiliates.

Follow these steps to setup the WordPress Shopping Cart plugin with Shareasale.com using the Affiliates Tracking extension plugin.

Install the WordPress Shopping Cart plugin

Assuming that you have a WordPress website ready and that you don’t have the WordPress Shopping Cart plugin installed and configured. You’ll purchase the WordPress Shopping Cart plugin and follow the installation instructions to install and activate it.

Install the Affiliates Tracking extension

In addition to the WordPress Shopping Cart plugin mentioned in Step 1, you’ll need to install and activate the Affiliates Tracking extension plugin which gives you the ability to configure clicks and sales tracking codes accordingly. You’ll purchase the Affiliates Tracking extension.

Get Shareasale.com Tracking Code

First login to your Shareasale.com merchant account.

Once you’ve logged in, click the “Step 4: Place Tracking Code” link on the left-hand side.

When the page loads, you’ll see an introduction and if you scroll down a bit, you’ll see a drop down menu and a button. Select “I am using a custom built shopping cart” in the drop down menu and click the “View Tracking Code Instructions” button to reveal the instructions.

The sale program link looks like this:

https://shareasale.com/sale.cfm?amount=14.95&tracking=475&transtype=sale&merchantID=31

All Shareasale.com tracking instructions are the same for all merchants, it is just the values such as the amount, tracking and merchantID in the link that changes but look at the instructions for reference and understanding. Then continue to the next step in this documentation.

Configure the Affiliates Tracking extension

Go to Checkout > Configuration > Affiliates Tracking in your WordPress dashboard where you have both the WordPress Shopping Cart plugin and the Affiliates Tracking plugin extension installed.

You won’t fill in anything into the clicks tracking box as Shareasale.com doesn’t provide us with clicks tracking code but we’ll be using the sales tracking box with the sale program link as shown in the previous step accordingly.

Take the example sale program link provided by Shareasale.com.

https://shareasale.com/sale.cfm?amount=14.95&tracking=475&transtype=sale&merchantID=31

We want to ping this link and the best way to do this is with an invisible image with the use of an HTML IMG tag and we also need to replace the values of ‘amount’, ‘tracking’ and ‘merchantID’ in the link. So replace the value ‘14.95’ of ‘amount’ with {affiliates_ordertotal} and the value ‘475’ of ‘tracking’ with {affiliates_orderid} and the value ’31’ of ‘merchantID’ with your unique Shareasale.com merchant ID and put the resulting link into the SRC attribute of an image. The result will be something like this:

<img src="https://shareasale.com/sale.cfm?amount={affiliates_ordertotal}&tracking={affiliates_orderid}&transtype=sale&merchantID=XXXXX" />

Remember to replace “XXXXX” with your unique Shareasale.com merchant ID.

And that’s it, the tracking code is done. Now it’s time to test!

Test Shareasale.com Tracking Code

In your Shareasale.com merchant account where you previously clicked “Step 4: Place Tracking Code” where it displayed the tracking instructions to you, there is a “Click here when you have completed this step” button. Click it to proceed.

Then in the left-hand sidebar of your Shareasale.com merchant account, click the “Step 5: Test the System” link/button to proceed with the testing of the tracking.

It will display 3 steps to you. You’ll click the “CLICK HERE TO START THE TEST” link, then go to your WordPress site and process an order and then return to the Shareasale.com page afterwards and click the “Click here when you have completed the test” button.

After clicking the “Click here when you have completed the test” button after processing a sale on your site, Shareasale.com will show you the transaction (considering that the tracking code was configured correctly) and you can then review to see if it is correct and click “Yes, these values are correct” to confirm.

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