The Affilliates For All website reflects the no-nonsense look of the application

If you run a Magento shop, and you would like to drive customers to your shop, then an affiliate programme may be one option to look at. This is basically low risk and low cost, since you only pay when you make sales.

The Affiliates For All Open Source application is able to support the running of your affiliate scheme.

Your affiliates would register on your site, through this application. Your only involvement would be to approve their application, and I guess attract these people in the first place by telling them about your scheme.

You can then provide the affiliates with a bunch of banners – it that’s your thing – or leave it up to them to create their own, which probably won’t be their thing, so do create the banners you want associated with your shop. The affiliates are provided with a snippet of HTML that they paste into their own website. The HTML contains a link back to any page of their chosing on your shop (remember, it is the affiliates’ job to decide how to send traffic your way, so long as they are not breaking any rules you get them to agree to on signing up).

All links back to your shop are then recorded against the originating associate, and all orders placed by visitors using those links are also recorded against the originating associate.

The application provides administration tools for calculating the orders-based commission and for paying the associates through PayPal.

As an application it is simple, and sticks to doing its main job (and main job only) without any fuss or eye candy, and it appears to do it rather well.

I don’t know why I have not come across this project before – most likely because the more commercial affiliate programmes have buried it somewhat. It is well written, well supported and has some excellent documentation written in some of the clearest English I have seen for a long time.

It is just writtem for Magento Commerce, and includes a plugin to handle cookies and order recording at the Magento end. With a little help, it may also be possible to expand the project to support other commerce systems too, but that all depends on demand and the help offered to the author, Pete Chown.

When I get this thing set up, I’ll report back on how it goes.

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The latest craze for designers seems to be redesigning airline boarding cards (and/or websites). Dustin Curtis started this off a little while ago, after wondering why American Airlines’ website is so difficult to use. Being proactive, Dustin redesigned the site and sent it (with an impassioned letter) to AA. This started a conversation with their web developer which is quite revealing about large organisations and their difficulties in bringing about change.

Delta Airline's existing boarding pass

This inspired Tyler Thompson to have go at redesigning the Delta Airline boarding pass. Tyler’s designs look great, a across between movie poster lettering and art deco, although they don’t take into account some of the realities of boarding pass printing. Tyler invited others to create their own designs and he lists some of these in the updates at the bottom of the page. A couple of notable examples are shown below.

Tyler's redesign

Timoni Grone addressed the redesign in a more practical way, ie. acknowledging the limitations of the current printing techniques and typefaces available in thermal printing machines in airports.

Timoni's redesign

But this is my favourite, as it is so conversational and simple:

Graphicology’s boarding pass redesign

So, since they’re getting so much free design advice, it will be interesting to see if any airlines actually want to improve their customers’ experience …

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