Affiliates Processor

Overview

Health Mobius built a portal to easily list thousands of branded HME & Pharmacy products so retailers can sell thousands of additional items from a virtual warehouse without investing in inventory and floor space.  Best of all, Health Mobius shielded retailers from any technology requirements since their portal are self-contained.

Challenge

As with any successful venture, there are growing pains.  Health Mobius quickly found themselves dedicating more staff time identifying and collecting affiliate orders.  Affiliates are paid weekly or monthly, so it was imperative that this process run smoothly with reports generated and affiliate commissions paid in a timely manner.

Health Mobius realized they needed a more structured and automated process to manage and pay their affiliates.  They required data entry screens to manage affiliates, a variety of manually generated revenue reports both at the summary and detail level so they could generate these as needed.

Finally, they needed a utility that would run 24/7/365 collecting affiliate orders from their sales database, capturing pertinent cost, revenue, and commissions.  Additionally, the utility would be required to generate weekly and monthly revenue/commission reports automatically sent to affiliates via email.

Given the breadth of the tasks and enormity of the requirements, they asked us to automate this process for them.

Solution

We created a utility the Affiliates Processor along with a native Windows 10 application Affiliates Manager which contain data entry screens, and revenue and commission reports.

The Affiliates Manager containing the data entry screens and reports were created using development tools to generate native complied executables that run natively in Windows 10 32/64-bit environments.  As part of the development process, we used all the latest Windows 10 development components and conventions for a low learning curb so little training is necessary since it is extremely intuitive.

The Affiliates Processor is designed to run 24/7/365 automatically monitoring and checking sales and product data for affiliate assignments.  Once an affiliate sale is determined, it is moved to an affiliate transaction table with all pertinent data to calculate revenue, costs, and commissions.  We included a way to initiate manual overrides in case an immediate affiliate sales check is necessary.

The reports module checks for affiliate transactions for both weekly and monthly sales and automatically sends revenue and commission reports in pdf and xlsx format.

MS SQL Server is the database used to store orders and transactions for the affiliates program.  Both the Affiliates Processor and Manager use SQL extensively to select data to be processed accordingly.

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is used to send revenue and commission reports via email alerts to their affiliates so they would be received in a timely manner.  Whether its weekly or monthly, affiliates ger their revenue and commission report quickly and inexpensively.

Botton Line

The Affiliates Processor along with data entry screens and reports we created, allows Health Mobius to manager their affiliate orders, revenue reports, and commissions quickly and easily.  They would not have been able to grow and manage their affiliates program as successfully without our expertise.

This process is one less concern for Health Mobius’s staff allowing them to focus on other aspects of affiliate recruitment and retention.  This project is good example where automating is the right answer and best course of action.

To learn more about how we can help with your business automation, 3rd party integrations, custom development, and reporting, contact us.