Suggestion for NATS and other affiliate systems/scripts
 

You already have the option to send an email every time an affiliate gets a signup. Why not expand that? Paypal, Paxum, Redpass, OKpay, LibertyReserve,... all have an IPN (Instant Payment Notification) system. Why not add something similar to NATS?

scenario:
1. Affiliate sends a visitor to a paysite (using a ref link).
2. Visitor joins the paysite.
3. NATS does everything it normally does.
4. NATS sends the details of what happened (the fact that a user signed up, the amount, the campaign etc. Basically the same info that a notification email would contain) via a HTTP POST request to a script on the affiliate's server.*

*: The affiliate would of course have the option to enable these types of notifications and set up the url of his script in the NATS control panel.


Benefits for affiliates:
- You can build your own stats collection script. No need for 3rd party programs that only run on certain OSs to check your stats. You can collect all data on your own central server.
- You can use this to automate your split testing.
- You can use this to automate the adjusting of banner campaigns. etc

Why is this better than a notification email? Because this way, the affiliate gets the data in a standardized format so he can automatically import it in his db and use that to optimize his own sites and traffic in real time.

Any benefits for affiliate programs?
- better targeted traffic from affiliates = more sales.
- less affiliates will use programs that automatically log in to scrape stats every x minutes.

http://wiki.toomuchmedia.com/index.p...liate_Postback

This, as well as any feature, can always be built out more, and is on "the list", which is a long list, but it's a good thing when a market leader continues to iterate and improve rather than stay idle.

It could be possible I guess.

I guess we should encourage program owners to enable it. So far, I haven't seen any program with that feature enabled.

Then again, most programs don't even enable email notifications. I've always wondered why.