hi, Amit, how are you?

Do you code your site yourself? Are you using off-the-shelf software? Do you have a development team?

Yes, you can do this simply:

1.  What you need to do is grab the referring URL (or, better, domain) when a visitor first arrives at your site.
2. Store this in what's called a 'session variable' (a variable that can be called by a page at any point during their session on your site).
3. As the 'checkout' page is loading, check for the existence of this session variable &, if it does exist, use it to pre-fill the promotion code field.

• The referring URL may not be what you expect (for example, you can view e-consultancy by going to http://193.41.101.10 , some sites allow you to use .com or .co.uk, etc)
• Very occasionally, visitors use browser plugins to block the ability to grab the referring URL
• If a visitor goes to your site from one of your chosen referrers, doesn't buy straight away, and then comes back a while later, you will have lost the session variable & will be unable to see where they came from.

• Instead of using the full URL, just search it for the existence of a particular string. For example, if you want to reward referrals from hotmail, look for "hotmail" in the referring URL, rather than "http://www.hotmail.co.uk"
• Instead of using referring URLs, create specific promo URLs & ask the sites that are linking to you to use those. For example http://www.yourwebsite.com?promo=1234
• Setting a cookie on the visitor's machine containing the referrer information (or the promo code, if you choose to use the above method) would allow you to reward them even if they chose to wait a few days between their first visit & their purchase
  

daniel

Just to add a little to Daniel's excellent reply.  I would recommend his final option of including some sort of code in the URL your referring site uses to identify them.  For example http://www.mydomain.com?id=associate.  The things after the question mark is called a search string and get to it in javascript with location.search. 

The javascript to pick up the code and put it into a cookie is fairly trivial (do view source on www.handleanything.com for example - around line  100.)   No doubt it can be improved if you have a lot of associates. 

Then picking up the cookie value and  storing it is not rocket science.  Alternatively if you have an promotion code you can probably put the promotion code into a cookie and use javascript to copy it to your existing web form. 

As long as you have some way of injecting some Javascript into the existing site then it shouldn't take very long to do. 

Bob

hi, Bob, Amit,

I agree with Bob, it is not 'rocket science'. I would recommend doing the processing on the backend though (in php/asp/whatever you're using) - there are a few disadvantages if you do this with javascript & no advantage that I can think of.

The 'search string' is actually called the 'query string'. I think the confusion is that in javascript you gemerally use 'location.search' to grab its contents.

daniel