There are basically three parties involved in an affiliate transaction.

• The Customer – the person who buys the product
• The Affiliate site- the person/site who promotes the product (sales rep)
• The Merchant site – the company selling the product.

Affiliate programs are very popular on the Internet and are an excellent mechanism to get into Internet selling as they don’t require any anything more complicated on your site as an hyperlink.

The actual process is illustrated below:

1) A visitor of your site (customer) activates a link to purchase a product.
2) The customer is sent a redirection to the merchant site. This redirection contains two parts.
    a. The link to the product.
    b. An Identifier (affiliate ID) that identifies your site as the affiliate.
3) The customer connects to the Merchants site and purchases the product.

Related Articles and Resources:

• Joining Affiliate programs

• Setting up Affiliate Programs