The Plimus platform includes tools that make it easy for you to work with other Plimus Vendors, as well as Affiliates, to cross-promote and cross-sell. This allows each party to use their reach, their sales volume and their experience with their own audience to generate new revenues by introducing Partner products to pre-qualified customers.

Once you have mastered the basics in this guide you will be able to develop extensive sales relationships with thousands of businesses using the platform. The processes outlined here will also help you attract potential Partners who are not presently using Plimus.

This guide shows how to increase your points of sale by partnering with other Vendors and Affiliates.

I. Activate Your Contracts for Affiliates and Cross-Vendor Sales

The first part of this guide shows how one vendor, Plimus Example Software, invites a sales partner, Happy Example Software, to sell the program Network Seeder J7.
To be sold by Partners, a number of settings must be properly aligned.
Navigate to the Settings section of any Contract, and scroll down to the section marked Marketing.
To make sure this contract can be made available, you'll need to:

1. Check Available to Partners. This is the primary 'switch' to allow other Vendors and Affiliates the possibility of promoting this contract.
2. Set an attractive Partner commission. The default of 30% reflects the dominant 'median' rate - increase your rate to attract more interest, or decrease it if your product will attract re-sale interest alone.
3. Select Yes next to Auto Approve Partners if you prefer to allow any Partner who wishes to promote this Contract to be able to do so. Select No if you prefer to manually review and approve requests.
4. Check Allow Cross-Vendor Sales by Partners to ensure that other Vendors can list this Contract as a promotion within their purchase process.

Tip: To make your products more visible to third party sellers select Yes in the Publish in the Plimus Catalog field; and check the box next to the phrase Participate in Plimus Marketing Channels. These will allow your Contract to be included in the exclusive Plimus feed program, and allow specially approved download sites to carry and sell your offering.

Find New Partners to Sell Your Products

From the home page of the Control Panel, open the Affiliates and Partners link situated on the top menu.

Search and Browse the Plimus MarketPlace to find potential partners. You might also want to investigate on the Web and among your existing industry contacts to broaden your reach; new members of the Plimus community are always welcome!

Once you have identified potential Partners, click on the Invite Partners to Sell Your Products link at the foot of the page, or Invite New Partners element in the pull-down menu at the head of the page. Either will bring you to the Invite Partners settings page.

Invite Partners to Market Your Products

Use this screen to create Partner invitation links. These links may be shared with as many, or as few, partners as required. You may create as many, or as few, as needed to manage your partnerships.

Invitations can cover all your products, and be automatically approved, or you can limit them to one or more Contracts and one or more Vendor(s) or Affiliate(s). Note that once a partner is approved for all Products & Contracts, they will be eligible to resell all new Contracts you may release in the future.

Different commissions can be defined when creating a new invitation, as can a time limit set for acceptance. This allows you to build the terms and conditions of your partnerships exactly as they need to be to drive mutually-profitable agreements,

Invitations can be restricted to a specific Vendor/Affiliate or email address if required, so that you can be confident only your intended recipient will be able to access a carefully-negotiated deal.

When you click the Generate Invitation Link button at the foot of the page, the screen will reload and display to create a Partner Invitation link. Simply copy and paste this into an email and send to your partner, and you’re done.

You can access past invitations by using the drop-down labeled My Products at the top left of the page, and selecting the value View Open Invitations.

Tip: To reduce back-office work, always set Invitations to Automatically approve requests when you do not need to manually confirm invitees’ bona fides to resell your goods.

Distribute the Partner Invitation Link

The generated Partner Invitation Link can be emailed to specific Partners, and/or shared in any other convenient way, such as on your web site.

The link can be issued to existing Plimus Vendors and Affiliates; or to Partners who are not yet registered with Plimus. The recipient "accepts" the link simply by opening it. When the link is opened, the recipient will be transferred to the Plimus login page.

Recipient Partner Uses Invitation Link

When the recipient Partner clicks on the link, they are brought to the Plimus login page. If they are already a Plimus Vendor or Affiliate, they simply login using their existing credentials. If they are not currently a member of the Plimus community, they can quickly and easily register for an account.

In either case, once they successfully login to the system, the Plimus platform will remember the Invitation to which they are responding. Depending on the setting you selected earlier, the product will either appear in the recipient’s Control Panel for resale immediately (if the Invitation was set to Auto-Approve), or after you respond to the request to resell that was generated when your partner logged in.

From the recipient's side, existing Vendors will see the newly approved items in the Affiliated Product list on their Control Panel Home Page; for Affiliates, the line item will appear in the Product List.

Recipient Partner Logs In

The Partner (in this case another Vendor) logs in; the Control Panel displays a confirmation message regarding the invitation. In this instance, as the Invitation Request needs final manual approval by the sender, it is shown in the Recipient's Pending list.

If Automatically approve requests had been selected, the item would already be listed in the Affiliated Products list and the next step would not be required.

Invitation is Approved by the Issuing Vendor (Manual Approval)

On the next login to the system the Vendor who issued the Invitation will need to approve it to activate the product for the Partner. Until this is done the invitation will remain in pending status.

From the Home Page of the Control Panel, navigate to the Affiliates & Partners section. Select the My Products drop-down, and choose Pending Incoming Requests.

Select and click Approve to activate, or Decline to reject.

Approval Adds the Product to the Partner's Affiliated Product List

Once approved, the Partner will see the new item in their Affiliated Products list.

Partner Views Product Details

When the Partner clicks on the Product link they will see all relevant product details, including whether the product is cleared for Cross-Vendor sales. At the bottom of the page, all the relevant approved Contracts are listed. Clicking on one of the Contract links brings up the settings for that Contract.

Note: As the contract is cleared for Cross-Vendor Sales, a Vendor Partner can now offer it in one of two ways: a direct link to the BuyNow page (very similar to the process followed by an Affiliate); or as a Promotion within the purchase process of their own items. These processes are fully covered in the second part of this guide.

Partner Accesses Contract Details and Uses Buy Now Link

The contract page shows the Buy Now, Product Info, and Trial Download links. The Buy Now link can be immediately be used to generate sales by both Affiliate and Vendor Partners. The next screen shows the Buy Now page.

Tip for Advanced Users: If the Buy Now link is being used to sell the product on its own (i.e.; not within a promotion) then an IPN receiving script link can be added in the Notifications field. If the Contract is added as a Promotion to your own item, its details will be included in the IPN notification you already receive.

Partner's Buy Now Page

In this example the Buy Now link leads to this order page. This is an Affiliate-type sale, the Partner Vendor Happy Example Software is selling an item supplied by you and sold on your Buy Now page.

II. Extra Steps for Cross-Vendor Sales

Having received a Buy Now link, Partners who are also Vendors can actively start selling your products with their own if the Contracts they are approved to resell have been cleared for Cross-Vendor Sales.

In the following example, Happy Example Software is going to set up a Promotion to sell the same Affiliated Product Network Seeder J7, as a Promotion with its own product Special Discount Saver.

Cross-Vendor Sale Set Up - Step 1 Select Main Contract

The item is cleared for Cross-Vendor Sale so if the Partner is a Vendor in the Plimus system it can add the contract to another of its own contracts and offer it as a Cross-Vendor Sale. This is done through the Promotions facility by the Partner.
Select the relevant contract and then the Promotion link.

Cross-Vendor Sale Set Up - Step 2 Set Up Cross-Vendor Sale Promotion

1. This interface controls the Section text and appearance for Promotions relating to the final Order page.
2. Select whether you want the Promotion item to appear on the same page or not as the main offer.
3. Click Add New Promotion.
4. If you have more than one promotion item you can mix them.

Cross-Vendor Sale Set Up - Step 3 Add Specific Text for Each Promotion Element

On the second Promotion screen select the contract(s) you want to add within the Promotion.

To help increase conversion, you can replace the standard label (which would be the Contract name) with alternative text that encourages purchase. For instance, you could change the text from Network Seeder J7 to "Don’t miss this opportunity to add Network Seeder J7 to your basket and improve your results!"
The Promotion can be date limited, and quantity restricted if required.

Press Submit to save changes, then you can view the resulting page by clicking the Test BuyNow button.

Cross-Vendor Sale Set Up - Step 4 - Test the Buy Now Page

Click the Test BuyNow button to review the resulting order page.

Cross-Vendor Sale Set Up - Step 5 Access Buy Now Link

The final Buy Now page link can be accessed from the Contract's General Information page.

The Buy Now page will automatically take on the look and feel of the BuyNow setup associated with it. However, any party linking to the Buy Now page (whether the owner, an Affiliate or a Vendor Partner) can replace that look and feel by associating a different Buy Now template. To do so, simply add the attribute &templateId=XXXXXX, where the series of X's is replaced by the relevant template code.