The more I read about the affiliate program through CJ, the more I want to avoid it, if possible. I would like to recruit my own independent sales representatives. I would be paying them their commissions myself. I would like to set up a website for each sales rep and place a link there to my CP shop. I'm still relatively new to CP and can't figure out how to do this and track which website generated which sales.
Would CJ issue me more than one identifying number so I could link to my CP shop through
multiple external websites? Would CP then show me in sales reports which external websites generated which sales?
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Thank you.

My suggestion is to let this idea go and work on creating a shop people want to affiliate.

No one is going to trust a shopkeeper to track their own affiliate sales

CJ is your only option for affiliate traffic for your shop, unless CP changes affiliate programs.

Hugs
Susan

You do get one identifying number for each website that you "register" in your CJ account. You can also append identifying information (called an SID) to each link. The records are kept entirely by CJ.

I'm not sure how that helps you in your goal. Since it is against the rules to affiliate to your own products nothing of your own will appear in the tracking. Payment goes direct from CafePress to Commission Junction and thence to the affiliate. You could only use the CJ generated information to pay "sub-contractors" for selling other people's stuff, never your own.

Assuming, just for the sake of argument, that you could avoid detection and you DID sell your own stuff through CJ links it would be costly. If you have a decent markup and decent sales levels you lose more than you gain.

CafePress does not provide tracking information of any kind (other than the nominal and not particularly accurate designation of sales as "shop" "marketplace" or "affiliate") You do not have the ability to do your own tracking because your ability to track stops at the shopping cart.

While you probably could set up your own affiliate program on your own website, you are much better off to do what Susan said and spend the time working on your shop and your external websites working to promote your shop.

Setting up your own affiliate program isn't as easy as you would think. You couldn't just piggyback off of CP and use their CJ merchant program, you'd have to open your own - if not with CJ and you wanted to participate in a network, one of the others. Each having their own expenses to set you up in their network.

Even if you went on your own without the networks to promote you by offering your site inside their tools, you have the issues of having your own shopping cart, creating a method of tracking affiliate clicks, tracking cleared sales for each affiliate and writing checks to them. Doing all this, when are you going to have time to design and do the things that brought you to CP in the first place.

Now I'm gonna answer your questions in a different way just in case you weren't implying that you wanted to run your own program. CJ will issue more than one identifying number, one for each website you define in your settings in your CJ account. However, using PIDs from YOUR CJ account to connect to YOUR shop is against the CP affiliate program terms.

Instead of going through all the headache you are talking about going through, why not just help the people you recruit sign up at CJ. They could then provide you with their PIDs so you could apply them in the websites they run or you could teach them how to build the links in their sites. If they don't want to manage their CJ account, I believe they could even set you up as a user on their account so you could manage everything except where the checks go.