How do I offer affiliate products on Zen?

[kidzcomfort]

I'm trying to add a few affiliate products to my store but I'm not sure how to do this.

I want to show the category with the products, but I want the customer to be redirected to the affiliate site for purchasing.

I do not want the "Add to Cart" option on these products.

Is that possible?

thanks
raelynn

[velum]

I would like to start selling affiliate products using Zen Cart. I do not a system that redirects to an affiliates site for checkout, however. I want to have a product feed that I receive from affiliates that populate my catalog. The user will purchase the product on my site and I will send a feed to the affiliate so that they can fulfill the order.

Now I have no idea how to do any of this and I am new to Zen Cart itself. Does anyone know of any info that would be helpful to me?

I need to gather knowledge on:
1. Import/export feeds
2. Selling products that get fulfilled by multiple affiliates (drop shipping??)
3. Managing Commission rates

Are there any add-ons that might help me?

Thanks for any help...

[schoolboy]

There are no modules, nor any combination of modules (to my knowledge) that currently achieve this. Zencart is not a "conduit" system - it is a "destination" system, where all the processes are designed to interact with the site's own database and php.

In addition to a significant amount of php coding and database alterations/additions, your desired functionality will also require a complicated set of cron jobs, xml interpreting, order separating and shipping calculation to work effectively.

I don't think that Zencart is an appropriate foundation for this - it sounds more like a fully custom job to me.

I trust you have deep pockets...

[mjclementz]

Actually I developed a way to use affiliate products from Amazon on my own, using some off-label modifications that even a novice could do. Let me start by saying I scoured the web for a way to do this, to no result. The closest I got to a prepackaged solution or tutorial was, well, not very close at all. It made feel like this guy --> (sorry I thought he was funny, first post ya know..)

ANYWAYS, here's what I knew needed to be done. I knew I could just create my own "Buy Now" button that would redirect to Amazon's product page, but the issue was eliminating the Add to Cart button that would allow someone to purchase it from me. So to recap, two things here: adding a new buy it now button, and removing the other one. Well, I sell products of my own too, so it wouldn't do to totally remove the thing from every product. What I needed was an option I can turn on and off. That's when I began my love affair with the "Call For Price" option.

When you elect to set an item to "Call for Price" it does two things. First, it adds a small graphic next to the item name that says "Call for Price." Next, it replaces the "Add to Cart" button with a small text link that says "Call for Price." Perfect...sorta.

To achieve the right effect, you need to create a small (real small, like 10px by 3px) icon that you can use to replace the "Call it Now" graphic that shows up next to the item name. Find it in your host's File Manager, name it the same thing, and upload the new one to overwrite the old. I just used the Amazon logo for mine, since that's where the redirect would go. From there, I believe I googled "remove Call for Price link" or something to figure out what to delete in one of the PHP files. If you can't find it, PM me and maybe I can help. No promises though. That leaves a small empty box where the text link used to be that I can live with. It's not clickable and is hardly noticeable. Hey it's not perfect, though you could probably figure out how to remove that little box if you were ambitious enough.

OK, so that took care of the whole product page issue. I hope I didn't miss something there, let me know if I blatantly omitted some useful info. I do that sometimes.

To achieve a seamless effect I, as an Amazon affiliate, designed an aStore with very similar features to my Zen Cart store, thereby making it hardly even noticeable that you jumped from one site to the next. The only way you can tell is if you're familiar with the standard Amazon structure and style. So, when someone clicks the "Buy Now" button on my Zen Cart product page, they get taken to my aStore page which gives them all the standard Amazon fare: buying options, reviews, etc.

That turned out to be a rather long tutorial, and I hope it will help countless thousands do something I had to figure out on my own. Or at least a couple of poor saps, ya know whatever.

Oh, and if you want to see the final product you can check out my store here. Just click any that say Amazon under the item name.

[schoolboy]

Yes mjclementz, you've "tweaked" a couple of features to effect a re-direct, but it's a very, very far cry from what velum wants...

Your technique is entirely manual, and simply re-directs a visitor to another shopping cart system. What velum is looking for is the product, checkout and fulfilment management for a multitude of drop-shipper affiliates.

This is a complex requirement and I stand by my original post... It would probably easier to code this sort of cart from scratch, because modifying zencart to do it will be a bigger task.

A skilled programmer would no doubt "clone" some of the zc features he/she likes, but essentially, the project would be fully customized.

[DrByte]

Instead of going to all the trouble of the Call For Price button, you could just make sure you choose the "Document General" product-type from the pulldown before creating your product, and then embed your other vendor's links into your product description. The Document-General entries don't get buy-now buttons, so takes care of that issue for you automatically.

[velum]

MJ, what you are doing is a little more manual than what I am looking for but thanks for the posts, you've shown me how I can hack a few things if it comes to that.

Sticking to the Amazon example, what I would want is to use a web service to grab products from Amazon and update my product catalog with them. Then users would come to my store and purchase them (on my store, no redirection). Then I would notify Amazon of the sale so they could drop ship to the customer.

[zorro7444]

Is there a way to add a comparison shopping feature to ZenCart. If you go to a product page it would have the list of the Amazon sellers of that product?

[kobra]

Then users would come to my store and purchase them (on my store, no redirection). Then I would notify Amazon of the sale so they could drop ship to the customer.

This may be your vision but is this allowed by Amazon?
If it is then they probably have an API to effect this
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