NopCommerce for an affiliate site

Hi,

I want to know if nopCommerce is a viable solution for developing an affiliate website. I am thinking of using it in case I want to add a shopping cart/wishlist to the site in the future.

I don't need a cart or checkout at this stage, however would like to have the ability add one if things change.

Can the checkout and wishlist be disabled and/or toggled for different products? Would I need to change the source, or use a plugin, or etc to add affiliate products.

This is my first post on this forum, sorry in advanced if this question has been posted before.

Welcome to Nop!
Please explain in more detail "affiliate site".
By means of ACL you can hide prices, shopping cart and wish list from visitors. There are some plugins that let you export your product information to market places as eBay, Amazon, Google Shops, Facebook, etc.

I also am not sure what you mean my "affiliate site", but I am guessing that at some point you want to allow other merchants to list their products for sale on your site. If that is the case, then yes, you can use the built-in Vendors functionality to allow other merchants to sign up and input/manage their own inventories and orders from your administrative backend.

Yes, it is also possible to use nopCommerce without having to have any e-commerce functionality enabled. As Eduardo indicated, in ACL settings, you can disable Shopping Cart for all roles.

Thanks for the advice guys, I will play around with the ACL configurations and see if that works.

What I mean by an 'affiliate site' is just having a site that displays products from another site/supplier and linking back to them. No checkout required.

NopCommerce might be a bit overkill for something this simple, however, I may want to be able to add 'my own' products/inventory in the future which requires checkout.
Hope that makes sense.

Hello again-

Now I understand what you mean.
My advice would be to add the exact same products as on the sites where you will earn the commissions to your nopCommerce inventory. On each product, you should "Disable Buy Button"..and within the long description field, add your affiliate link to the same product.

<a href="http://www.someothersite.com/someproduct?youraffiliateid" target="_blank"><img src="/content/images/uploaded/buy_button.png"></a>

Yes, you should probably temporarily remove the Wishlist and Shopping Cart links from your site so your customers are not confused. You would need to just comment out that bit of code from the /Views/Common/HeaderLinks.cshtml view:

@*
        @if (Model.ShoppingCartEnabled)
        {
            <li id="topcartlink">
                <a href="@Url.RouteUrl("ShoppingCart")" class="ico-cart">
                    <span class="cart-label">@T("ShoppingCart")</span>
                    <span class="cart-qty">@T("ShoppingCart.HeaderQuantity", Model.ShoppingCartItems)</span>
                </a>
            </li>
        }
        @if (Model.WishlistEnabled)
        {
            <li>
                <a href="@Url.RouteUrl("Wishlist")" class="ico-wishlist">
                    <span class="cart-label">@T("Wishlist")</span>
                    <span class="wishlist-qty">@T("Wishlist.HeaderQuantity", Model.WishlistItems)</span>
                </a>
            </li>
        }
 *@