Using Shopify With Conventional Affiliate Tracking (S2S / Postback)
I know quite a few people want to use Shopify with conventional affiliate trackers like Voluum or Funnelflux.
That’s not possible out of the box, as Shopify doesn’t have support for postback-style conversion tracking.
However, it’s fairly simple to add, and here’s a tutorial on just how to do so!
Things You’ll Need
- A working tracker capable of Server-To-Server conversion tracking. Pixel tracking won’t work here – you need postbacks. All modern affiliate tracking systems I’m aware of will do this.
- A Shopify store up and running
- For the default setup I show you, a Zapier account – http://www.zapier.com . If you have a coder and a server, you can also use any other programming language to do the job a little cheaper, but Zapier works well and is simple.
- You won’t need to be able to program, but you will need to be familiar with editing HTML.
Step 1: Setup
Set your tracking up as normal, and make sure you’re passing the subid/clickid/whatever your tracker calls the unique ID parameter it uses to the Shopify page. Name the URL parameter you’re using for that “subid”.
Make a note of your Postback URL and format for your tracker – you’ll need it later.
Step 2: Customisation
In Shopify’s Admin panel, go to “Online Store”, then click on “Actions” and choose “Edit Code”.
In the code editor, open up “Sections”, and choose “product-template.liquid”. If that doesn’t exist in your theme, look for “product.liquid” instead.
Now look for the form “submit” button on that page. In the “Debut” theme, for example, it looks like this:
<button type="submit" name="add" id="AddToCart-{{ section.id }}" {% unless current_variant.available %}disabled="disabled"{% endunless %} class="btn product-form__cart-submit{% if product.options.size == 1 and product.variants.title == 'Default Title' %} product-form__cart-submit--small{% endif %}">
Just above that, add this line of code:
<p class="line-item-property__field"><input id="subid" type="hidden" name="properties" value="blahblahbl ...