If I am not mistaken, there are two types of shopping carts. Those that use static html and those that produce pages on the fly. I would very much like to hear comments on the pros and cons of each.

Also, does anyone know of a cgi-script that will track and credit affiliate sales commission even if the affiliate's visitor comes back directly to the merchant's site?

Originally posted by Ron
If I am not mistaken, there are two types of shopping carts. Those that use static html and those that produce pages on the fly. I would very much like to hear comments on the pros and cons of each.

Also, does anyone know of a cgi-script that will track and credit affiliate sales commission even if the affiliate's visitor comes back directly to the merchant's site?

Well, the con about static HTML page would be that you would have to manually edit the page with a HTML editor everytime you want to change something (this goes for each single file).

About the tracking part, some carts save cookies in the visitors computer to know where they originally came from. Another way would be to keep the affiliate info in the URL (i.e. http://www.mystore.com/?aff=G458KEG65 or something).

Also, does anyone know of a cgi-script that will track and credit affiliate sales commission even if the affiliate's visitor comes back directly to the merchant's site ?

We use commission cart pro and it does work that way , using cookies . You can specify how long the cookie lasts for (days weeks ) . We have ours set for 30 days . Has online affiliate stats , auytomated affiliate signup etc.

We have been using it for low volume sales (about 1.75 sales per day ) for about 6 months and it has worked well .
http://www.cgiscriptcenter.com/comcart/index2.html

Look at http://www.hotscripts.com.
They have a few Perl and PHP affiliate programs listed.