Okay, bit of a noob to affiliate marketing here, with what may seem a stupid question. We have a twin-pronged approach to our niche, with a tasteful blog for product reviews and news, and an e-commerce site where we can refer buyers. We have several affiliate suppliers, and so began by building a Zen Cart portal to their specific products. With the first order, we ran into a snag. Instead of referring the customer to the affiliate, where the order could be completed and cookie registered, the shopping cart took his details and notified us of the sale. We, of course, can't fulfill the order, since that's what the merchant site does. Clearly, this isn't what we wanted it to do. In this case, we got in touch with the customer and sorted the situation, giving him the affiliate link and explaining about third-party providers, but we're back at square one for the e-commerce site. Any ideas? Now we're thinking of just setting up the pages in Wordpress, but we still haven't solved the basic problem we thought the shopping cart would solve: how to refer the same client to multiple affiliates for a set of products they've chosen on our site?
I don't know of any simple solution to what your looking for, a very very basic and quite ugly way of doing it would be to build a amazon astore, but they don't look nice and you can only make very small styling adjustments. The other solution is building your own shopping site in a programming language your comfortable with (ie PHP etc) and then using tools from amazons developer kit or ebay's developer kit to populate them. I'd go for the second option if your looking for quality and a professional look but it would take time and skill and might not be what your looking for to be honest as you lost me at some points.