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eSellerate Announces Affiliate Program Update and Other New Features

Posted in eSellerate on the June 19th, 2007

eSellerate announces the immediate availability of an update that includes the following features:

• Major enhancements for the eSellerate Affiliate program: Hosted eST, Affiliate Landing Pages & Hosted eST Tracking report
• Shopping cart preservation
• Support for editing coupons after you activate them
• Three additional ways to access _Custom.Data variables collected in Custom Layouts

These features have been available in limited release, and now are available to all publishers using eSellerate.

Hosted eST

The new Hosted eST option enables affiliates to provide eST trial versions of your products without having to host the downloads themselves. This differs from standard eST, which requires affiliates to host the downloads and keep them up to date.

With Hosted eST, the affiliate provides a link on its web site that allows customers to download the eST version of your product from eSellerate’s servers. (The file will be customized with the proper affiliate ID.) Benefits of this option include:

• The eST file accessible through the link is always current, so the affiliate never needs to make a new one available when you update the file.
• By hosting the eST file, eSellerate is able to provide a number of tracking options that are not available with standard eST. (See “Hosted eST Tracking Report” below.)

There is nothing you need to do to enable Hosted eST functionality for your affiliates. You should continue to create and maintain your eST files as usual. All of your current and future eST files will be available on the eSellerate Affiliates web site as both our standard eST and Hosted eST downloads, giving your affiliates the choice of which to use.

Affiliate Landing Pages

Affiliates are experts in driving traffic and potential customers. That does not mean they are product experts. With eSellerate’s custom landing pages, they do not have to be.

Landing pages are customized web pages - established by you and representative of your marketing expertise - that affiliates can use to promote your individual products. All that affiliates need to do is direct their customers to the landing page, where the customers can read about the product and then either purchase it or download an eST trial version (when trials are available). Because all promotion takes place on the landing page, there’s no need for affiliates to list and update product information on their own.

You can assign up to six landing pages to each of the SKUs that you make available for affiliate sale. If you assign multiple landing pages to a SKU, your affiliates will be able to choose the ones that best fit their needs and collectively test the effectiveness of new layouts, marketing messages or promotions.

eSellerate provides an EZ Landing Page that you can assign to your SKUs without having to create and customize your own landing pages.

A sample EZ Landing Page

The editor for creating and customizing landing pages is available through the Layouts section of the Sales Manager home page.

For more information on landing pages, see the online help, beginning with the overview that is available under the “Landing Pages” topic.

Hosted eST Tracking Report

You can use this new report to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns based on factors such as the number of Hosted eST downloads and Landing Page visits.

For more information, go to the list of available reports on the Admin Reports page and click Hosted eST Tracking. Then see the provided online help.

Shopping Cart Preservation

Shopping cart preservation is a feature that allows returning online customers to resume where they left off.

For up to 14 days after a customer leaves your online store without completing a purchase, eSellerate can remember the contents of the shopping cart and any personal information entered (excluding credit cards). When the customer returns to your catalog page, eSellerate fills in the saved information, making it more convenient for the customer to complete the purchase. In preliminary results, eSellerate has seen approximately 6.7% of all saved carts convert to completed orders using this feature.

Shopping cart preservation is now enabled for all publishers using eSellerate. The only requirement is that your store must use custom layouts.

Editing Active Coupons

Prior to this release, once you activated a coupon, you couldn’t edit it. This restriction helped ensure that the coupons would always provide the intended discounts. However, a number of publishers have requested the ability to edit Active coupons, for reasons such as correcting mistakes found after the coupons have been distributed to their customers. In response, we have added an edit option to the Coupon Details page of Active coupons.

Please note the following cautions before you edit a coupon that has already been distributed to your customers:

• You have the ability to change any of the attributes, including the coupon discount.
• Once you select the edit option, your customers will not be able to use the coupon until you activate it again.

More Ways to Access Custom Data Variables

There are now three additional ways to view or access _Custom.Data variables collected in Custom Layouts:

• The Order Detail page (available through any search or report that lists orders)
• Daily Summary Export (available through Sales Reports)
• The automated daily summary report file (available through Login & Contact Information)

Fields for CUSTOM_0 through CUSTOM_9 have been added to the end of the two report files noted above. If you would like to see an example of these changes, you can download a comma-separated version of the Daily Summary Export file at http://www.esellerate.net/downloads/dailysummaryfileexport.csv.