Background
Prescription Online Drugs is a leading established Canadian online pharmaceutical supplier with medicines with the highest standard form major suppliers. Since 2002 one of its driving forces has been performance-based marketing program that now accounts for 20 percent of the online retailer's business.

Business Challenge
After a year of being online, Prescription Online Drugs decided that it was time to allow affiliates to promote the site even further. There were several commercial affiliate programs on the market; however most were not versatile enough to "plug in" to the current system. This is where they decided to make an affiliate and tracking system with MSTART.com. When MSTAR.com first started writing the affiliates program, Prescription Online Drugs already had well over 8,000 customers and 3,000 members subscribed to its newsletter list. The affiliate program had to be simple to use and allow anyone with a web site to simply copy and paste some HTML code in the form of a link on his or her site.

The affiliate program needed to server 5 main requirements:
> Boost site revenue for Prescription Online Drugs
> Open several other possible marketing channels
> Increase the awareness of the Prescription Online Drugs brand
> Bring the power of automation and tracking into play
> Allow affiliates to track their sales and traffic to Prescription Online Drugs site

Solution
Before the affiliate program was developed, the Prescription Online Drugs web site had a logical layout with room for expansion. It also had some 3,000 potential affiliate members on its newsletter list, which are contacted monthly.

The affiliate program is another feature of the Prescription Online Drugs web site, and as such, several methods were developed to promote the program to both new and existing Prescription Online Drugs visitors and customers:
> Newsletter: Each episode of the Prescription Online Drugs newsletter includes a text ad that describes the affiliate program and how it can be used so that visitors can profit.
> Site: The Prescription Online Drugs site contains a scrolling marquee. This marquee generates excellent click-thru rates of 3-4%. A mention of the affiliates program was added to the marquee and it received a 1.7% click-thru rate, which is well above the industry average.
> Word of mouth: The most effective method for promoting the affiliates program was via word of mouth. In just 3 days, Prescription Online Drugs had well over 50 people already implementing the affiliates program into their web site from word of mouth recommendations alone.

The affiliates program needed several different modules, these modules are:
> Affiliate Signup: This function accepts the details of an affiliate and stores them in the database.
> Affiliate Login: Once signed up, an affiliate can login to access his affiliate statistics as well as the page to generate links, banners, etc.
> Link Generator: Prescription Online Drugs affiliate program allows its affiliates to choose from a wide range of both text and banner links for their site. Affiliates can link to individual products and categories, or they can choose from any of the 8 pre-made affiliate banners.
> Click-Thru Reports: After affiliates have taken their tracking code, this function allows the affiliate to see the number of click-thru from visitors to their site. These results can be viewed for last week, last month, or between particular dates.
> Sales Reports: Allows affiliates to view how many sales have resulted from their visitor's click-thru to the Prescription Online Drugs web site.

Conclusion
The Prescription Online Drugs affiliates program increased sales dramatically and all objectives in terms of branding, profits and market share were achieved. The affiliates program has been running for 1 year now and has well attracted well over 500,000 unique visitors from the various sites that Prescription Online Drugs 's affiliates have setup. If I could recommend just one way to boost the traffic and sales of an already existing web site, then it would have to be an affiliates program!

Technology Used
Server: Linux
Database: MySQL
Web Server: Apache Web
Programming: PHP

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