Serving up different shopping cart home pages

My client wants to serve up different shopping cart pages depending on select groups of users, who would click on a link on another site and be directed to a shopping cart page (there's only one actual shopping cart page of products right now) on my client's site just for their group. Each group's shopping cart page will be an exact duplicate of the main shopping cart page.

He's trying to track these clickthroughs to determine how much in commissions to pay to each referring website owner. That's his ultimate goal.

I have absolutely no idea how to do this. I thought I did, but nah, not so much. I don't think it can be done, and if it can't, how do I accomplish my client's objective?

Can anyone help me?

You probably need an affiliate marketing setup which will track referrers. (JRox is one that is available for Zen Cart.)

This may take care of the situation by itself; you should be able to specify the landing page from each referrer to be a category page with the appropriate product listing for the group.

Will this hide the category page for that group from everyone else?

I really know enough to get into trouble, working my way through the book notwithstanding.

No, that will not hide anything. For that, you might try the hideCategories mod in Free Addons. I'm not sure exactly how it would dovetail with the affiliate system, but it is made to serve custom content to only those given the link.

I am so incredibly confused and overwhelmed with Zen Cart, and I'm a pretty smart cookie. I'll check out hideCategories. Thank you.