I'm having a hard time finding the answer to my question because I don't quite get all the lingo yet. How do affiliate links work exactly? When a user clicks on a link, do they have to purchase that item immediately for me to get the commission? Is there a timed session? Do I get a commission if they buy something else during that session? Here's an example... Let's say I have a site about supplements. One of the products that I am promoting is available in different strengths, quantities, and packs. In other words, there are several variations (and therefore different product #s) of basically the same product. Am I supposed to post an affiliate link for each one, which I assume may overwhelm users? What happens if they click on one, end up browsing the seller's site, and purchasing a different variation? Please help!
For how long you get credited with commissions is different for every merchant. Some affiliate programs will give you credit for 30 days, other programs maybe 60 days. If you are promoting an online store with thousands of products, you will usually get a commission for every product they purchase, not just the product they found on your site. Hope this helps.
depends from merchant to merchant, ask your affiliate manager if your unsure. About sessions, this also depends on the merchant. They will normally tell you how long there cookies last. However, if someone notices the affiliate link and really wants to remove it. They can simply clear there cookies. Use link masking for all your affiliate links.
This things depends upon the site as if you used your affiliate link and site visitor purchased it after 2 days so many sites providing the cookies and sessions to maintain the user statistics and many doesn't maintain the user statistics via cookies/sessions to give the share of any sales by any affiliate link which is visited previously!!!
There is a plugin for wordpress called "Pretty Links" which can do it. If your not using wordpress... then you can do it in Cpanel... by creating a sub-domain then a redirect. If you don't have that... you can do poor man's masking by using sites like: http://www.shorturl.com/ http://www.tinyurl.com/ Hope this helps.