I think it would be cool if there was a referral tracking mechanism within vendor tools that could track the referrals from vendor reps...total and over a set time frame. I would like to provide more incentive for my vendors to promote the forum. For example for every referral they get a $1 off on their sponsorship cost.

Jim,
This is something you could do with iDevAffiliate without having to integrate it into Vendor Tools. I use iDevAffiliate on DTO and, if you haven't already, you can sign up so that the links in your footer to DTO will give you credit for any sales that you refer to us. I'm sure the same process would work for what you are considering.

If you would like some additional information on this or need help installing/configuring let me know.

Thanks!

Mark

__________________
Mark Ferguson
President - Drive Thru Online, Inc.
Drive Thru Online – Turning Passion into Profit

I will have to look into that. That would be a good solution for online vendors to link over. Does that also indicate when a new member signs up and gives credit? Could this be integrated with the manage vendor area/VendorCP for easy, all in one place, tracking?

When I first posted above I was just thinking about using the vB existing referral system along with something like the referral mod I am running on my site but have it display and make custom querries per vendor within the manage vendor/vendor CP area. I have a lot of brick and mortor sponsors that hand my cards out at their shop. I think it would be a good way to encourage that sort of thing to give them discounts on advertising. But also need a way for me to be able to manage it without creating a bunch of extra steps.

The way I would like implement it would be as follows:
1) When a vendor signs on with you provide them with the sign up on your iDevAffiliate system. They sign up and are effectively a part of your affiliate program and they have a URL that tracks their affiliate sales. For example it might look like the following:

PHP Code:

http://www.captivereefs.com/14338.html 


2) When you vendors are promoting your site they would give out the above URL

3) If an end user used that URL to visit your site we would need to add a hook in the registration process to look for the affiliate information. If found and the user completed registration the vendor would get a credit to his account.

After the vendor hit a certain limit in his account you could either pay him directly via Paypal using the functions already built into iDevAffiliate or you could just transfer that into a spreadsheet and use it for a discount against their month advertising.

iDevAffiliate has a workflow that notifies affiliates when a new affiliate sale has been made. If they were interested in tracking these there is an admin interface in the product that allows them to monitor everything.

With the exception of building a plugin for the registration system I think this is pretty straightforward and a really interesting idea that could be great for driving traffic to your site and rewarding vendors for doing so!

Mark

__________________
Mark Ferguson
President - Drive Thru Online, Inc.
Drive Thru Online – Turning Passion into Profit

I definitely would like to do this Mark. Once I get a few of my irons out of the fire, I'd like to take you up on the help offer. :)

(BTW- Not sure if you saw it, I posted this morning on an old help ticket an error I'm getting with VT.)