ECWID is an excellent online shopping cart and WEB store builder.
ECWID allows you create online catalog of your products for sale. For each product you may add name, description, images, options (such as color and size), different payment methods (Paypal, authorize.net, Google checkout and other), different shipping methods, etc…

Once you created your catalog – ECWID gives you snippet of HTML code – widget that you may embed into any blog or website that allows javascript. Once widget is embedded into page – that page becomes fully functional beautiful online store.

Fun part of it is that you may create 10 websites and 20 blogs and paste into each of them your online store!
ECWID even allows you to have free account (limited to 100 products) to build fully functional online store. You only need to add/edit/update your products in one place and changes will automatically be reflected in all your sites!

Paid ECWID account is pretty cheap – currently $17/mo and it gives you an ability to have 20,000 products, build SEO optimized inline catalogs and have access to their API. Here is a list of features that ECWID offers.

Unfortunately ECWID guys did not include any integrated affiliate tracking system.
In other words if you build ECWID-based online store – there is no way to invite affiliates to promote your store.

But with the help of WordPress + new MemberWing-X it is now possible to include full affiliate tracking functionality to all your ECWID stores!

Starting with MemberWing-X 5.432 you may signup new affiliates and add complete affiliate tracking for your ECWID-powered online store.
Please note that this feature requires paid ECWID account.

Here’s what you may do with the help of MemberWing-X Integrated Affiliate Network and ECWID:

• Offer easy signup to your affiliates directly via WordPress “register” link: YOUR-SITE.com/wp-login.php?action=register
  Anyone who registered automatically becomes your affiliate. Use their email addresses to send them affiliate payments via Paypal.
• Allow anyone to build affiliate links to your store even without need to signup. This is achieved via links like this:
  YOUR-SITE.com/some-page/?aff=affiliate@email.com
• Allow any affiliate to build affiliate link to any page of your site. This is named “deep linking” and is very powerful way for affiliates to promote your store.
• Allow to set the order of priority between first or last affiliate who referred sale to you.
• MemberWing-X affiliate tracking happens automatically and does not require customer to click anything
• MemberWing-X affiliate tracking does not require customer to be redirected to any fake “thank you” pages with invisible image links embedded.
• Affiliate tracking works with any payment processor supported by ECWID
• Affiliate tracking happens via cookie. You may set cookie lifetime to any number of days you want.
• Lower affiliate links visibility by changing affiliate prefix from default ‘aff’ to something more creative like ‘sweet’ or ‘yes’.
• Every incoming affiliate link helps to increase organic ranking of your online store and attract more visitors.
• Track affiliate ID as well as customer’s IP address for any sales that passes through ECWID online store. This could be very helpful for extra conversion analytics and statistics.
• Affiliate ID and (optionally) customer’s IP address is made available to you via ECWID backend admin panel.

Here’s how it works:

1. Affiliate signs up at your site to promote your products.
2. Affiliate builds affiliate link to your store and shares it with his followers.
3. Someone clicks on his affiliate link and buys your product.
4. Referring affiliate’s ID is captured by MemberWing-X, recorded and sent to ECWID system.
5. You receive payment and notification about sale.
6. You login to your ECWID store admin backend and see ID of affiliate who referred sale for you.
7. Affiliate ID is the same ID that wordpress assigns to every registered member of your blog.
8. You find affiliate via your WordPress admin panel->Users, calculate payout and send Paypal payment to your affiliate’s email address via Paypal according to your rules.

Requirements:

• You need to have website based on self-hosted WordPress.
• You need to have ECWID Shopping cart plugin (free) activated
• You need to have MemberWing-X plugin uploaded and activated. Currently free version of plugin allows you to run affiliate network, but this might change.
• You need to enable affiliate integration with ECWID at MemberWing-X admin settings:
  MemberWing-X->Affiliate Network Settings->Enable affiliate tracking for ECWID shopping cart service – [x]

As you may see – this integration is pretty simple and can be launched and enabled pretty quickly.
Having an ability to launch and run affiliate tracking system in sync with your online store is very powerful marketing method.

And having many affiliate links pointing to your online store will help to boost your organic ranking with search engines as well.

Current limitations:
For now ECWID does not allow direct integration with their backend CRM system so affiliate payouts has to be manually calculated and paid to affiliates by you.

While you *will* have full affiliate tracking data available to you via ECWID admin panel – payouts to your affiliates needs to be taken care of manually by you.

For more information and step by step instructions on how to enable affiliate tracking for your ECWID store – please see:

MemberWing-X manual, Chapter: “Integration with ECWID.com – online shopping cart and WEB store builder”.