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By askit on
First of all, this is not an advertisement. This is just inviting community members to share their ideas on our plan.
We created a simple Drupal module for our product http://acobot.com but have no resources to get it go through approval process or maintain it in the future.
As we recently published our affiliate program, which shares 30% of monthly recurring payment, we're considering to invite Durpal community members to pick up the job. Our idea is a member or a group of members can create a Drupal modules and/or themes that help Drupal site owners integrate Acobot services with their websites.
While we will not directly pay for the work, the members can embed affiliate links in the modules/themes. All customers follow the links to sign up in 60 days will be credited to their Acobot affiliate accounts. We will pay the affiliates lifetime 30% commission for each paying customer they refer. For more information on our affiliate program, see http://acobot.com/affiliate.
We have created a WordPress plugin and it works pretty well in sending people to our website. See wordpress.org/extend/plugins/acobot/ . We haven't promoted it actively but the plugin was downloaded for about 14,000 times in the passed 12 months. I think a well-maintained and promoted Drupal module might be able to achieve similar performance.
Said that we'd like to invite you to give your input. What do you think about Drupal module/themes as an affiliate tool? If you're a developer, are you interested in developing a module/theme for any 3rd party software and earn commission?
Any comments or suggestions will be appreciated.
Comments
I'm a little unclear on how
I'm a little unclear on how this works. The person who creates the module gets a 30% commission for each person who signs up, regardless of the site the module is used on? Or the site owner gets a 30% commission if they use the module on their site?
If the module developer gets the commission, then what is the motivation of a site owner to put the module on their site? And if the site owner gets the commission, then what is the motivation of the developer to build the module?
And finally, does your service provide and API to integrate with? If not, are you expecting the developer to create the API on your system as well? And if so, then do you have documentation for your API?
Contact me to contract me for D7 -> D10/11 migrations.
Good questions :-)
> The person who creates the module gets a 30% commission for each person who signs up, regardless of the site the module is used on?
[A] Yes, the modules/themes author get 30% of any payments we receive from paying customers that are referred from the modules/themes, including their project pages on Drupal site.
> Or the site owner gets a 30% commission if they use the module on their site?
[A] No, site owners or the module/theme users will pay us for using our services, starting from $29 per month.
> ... then what is the motivation of a site owner to put the module on their site?
[A] With Acobot (see http://acobot.com), the site owners can wow their users with a virtual robot, give instant answers and turn more of them into paying customers. Among millions Drupal site owners, many run business websites for profit, many of which are willing to pay a small sum to earn more from their websites.
> ... does your service provide and API to integrate with?
[A] We already have some APIs in place. See http://acobot.com/doc/ref/chat_js_apis. We're adding more APIs so that Acobot can work with other software better.
On the other hand, APIs are not necessarily used to create your first basic module. For instance, our plugin for WordPress doesn't involves any APIs. What it does is just help WordPress site owners to install Acobot with an installation key, without needing to copy/pasting codes onto their sites, as described on this page http://acobot.com/doc/guide/chat/installation.
By creating an Drupal module for Acobot, you can
You can make it as very simple (like our WP plugin) or very powerful as you like.
Feel free to let me know if the above answered your questions.
Good answers. In all honesty,
Good answers.
In all honesty, my concern would be that site owners can go in and easily change the affiliate link in the module, meaning that they get the referral rather than the module developer. This means the module developer gets nothing.
Contact me to contract me for D7 -> D10/11 migrations.
I understand it. The
I understand it. The situation you mentioned might happen. None of affiliate programs can guarantee 100% accurate tracking.
However, that's not a problem as a whole because for the most of site owners they just don't have no motivation to modify the links - they cannot get remarkable benefits for the modification if they just use the module for their own websites. Most, if not all, of site owners would download the module and use it, without modifying it.
In addition to the links embedded in the module, there are links on the project pages, which you always keep the total control.
Feel free to let me know if you have any further questions.
Two new APIs
We just added two new APIs, with which you can hide/show Acobot chat box.
We will publish more APIs at http://acobot.com/doc/ref/apis
REST APIs
We recently added REST APIs for developers (http://acobot.com/doc/ref/rest).
This is initially designed for email automation. With the APIs, one can develop an application that give an auto reply to each inbound email, including personalized answers to customer questions.
Those APIs can be also used for the use cases below.
With Acobot REST APIs now you can create more powerful automation features for Drupal sites!