AffiliateGuerrilla works using cookies. When an affiliate signs up they are automatically given their default referral url that they should use to refer customers or other affiliates. This referral url contains a referrer id (rid=xxx) and a product id (pid=xxx)
The default values are:
- rid = the name the affiliate chooses when they sign up.
- pid = the default product id you set in you "Manage Defaults" page - defaults.asp
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When you set up a product in AG the referral url will be http://www.yourdomain/store/product.asp - The product id will be tagged onto the end like this - http://www.yourdomain/store/product.asp?pid=001
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When a visitor visits your affiliates link, AG puts a cookie on their computer which stores the affiliate's rid, and pid values. This cookie is set to expire after 90 days. However if that customer orders within 90 days of visiting the referral url, then the referrer id is recorded with the customer information in the database so that if they make future purchases the original affiliate gets the commission.
If the affiliate is using the url to refer other affiliates, this will happen automatically because if a visitor goes to register.asp to sign up as an affiliate, the register.asp page detects the referrer id in the cookie and records this rid=xxx value against the new member's name in the database.
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Since a 90 day cookie is written when you click on an affiliate's referral url, then if you use this referral url to sign up a second affiliate the rid value will be recorded in the database as their referrer.
However now you want to pretend to be the second affiliate. You will first need to clear the cookies from your browser cache. You can do this by going to cookietest.asp in your affiliate program directory. This page shows which cookies are set. You reset these by going to cookie_reset.asp and refreshing your browser while on that page. You can test if the cookies have been reset by going to cookietest.asp again and refreshing that page. The values should show nothing.
Next you can log in as the second affiliate and go to "MY ADS". Get the referral url for that affiliate by selecting "GET LINK" and open that in a new browser window. This should write the new affiliate's referrer id in a 90 day cookie on your browser. Click on cookietest.asp again to see if this has happened.
If you now make an order, you will find that the second affiliate is the referrer. If you have 2 tiers of commission, both affiliates will get a commission if the order is processed. And so on - for as many tiers of commission that you have set up.
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