How to set up and process automated commission payouts for affiliates

Affiliate for WooCommerce plugin helps you to add, manage affiliates, and track performance from a single place – commissions, sales, payouts, leaderboard, etc. Earn money without hard work. Increase your brand outreach, and get potential customers.

Automatic payouts ensure timely commission payment and boost affiliate morale to encourage increased sales.

This documentation explains how you can automatically send a commission payout.

Enable automatic payout by referring to this setting.

Automatic payouts currently support PayPal.

For automatic payouts via PayPal, make sure all the requirements mentioned here are met.

1. Select the affiliates to whom you want to send the automatic payouts.
2. Set the date when you want to send the automatic payouts each month.

Also, you can set

1. A minimum threshold value to qualify for an automatic payout.
2. A maximum amount which to be sent to each affiliate during the automatic payout.
3. A refund period so referrals within the refund period aren’t included in the automatic payouts calculation.

Check here for how to configure each of the above settings.

The scheduled commission amount that will be sent to each affiliate will be calculated based on the Refund period, Minimum affiliate commission for payout, Maximum commission to pay an affiliate, and Automatic payouts including affiliate settings.

Visit the Pending Payouts dashboard from WordPress admin > WooCommerce > Affiliates > Pending Payouts.

The pending payouts dashboard shows a list of affiliates whose payouts are pending.

It shows the following:

• Name – name and email of the affiliate
• Total Unpaid Commissions – outstanding commission for each affiliate
• Total Scheduled Commissions – It contains the following:
  • The commission amount each affiliate will receive in the upcoming automatic payouts.
  • A snooze button, clicking on which will reschedule the automatic payouts for that affiliate till the next period or month.
  • Scheduled date and time when the automatic payouts will go.

Note: If you don’t have automatic payouts enabled, the Pending Payouts dashboard will only show the Name and the Total Unpaid Commissions column.

The affiliate manager or the store admin (if the Affiliate manager email is not set) receives the ‘Affiliate Manager – Automatic Payouts Reminder’ email twice before payout.

One email goes two days before the automatic payouts are scheduled, and another goes one day before the payout.

Separate emails will be sent for each affiliate that is selected in the ‘Automatic payouts include affiliates’ setting. For example, you have selected 10 affiliates, so the store admin or the affiliate manager will receive 10 different emails.

This email is automatically enabled or disabled based on the Automatic Payout setting. Do not turn off this email manually.

The email subject is ‘Outstanding affiliate commission will be automatically paid’.

The body of the email contains the name of the affiliate and the date when the payout will be processed.

Also, it will include a link to review and manage the affiliate’s automatic payouts.

For sending email notifications to affiliates regarding their upcoming automatic payouts the following two actions are scheduled:

afwc_send_automatic_payout_email_notification_1

• Purpose: Sends an initial notification email two days before the scheduled automatic payout. This email serves as a heads-up about the upcoming payout.
• Trigger: Scheduled to run two days before the automatic payout date.

afwc_send_automatic_payout_email_notification_2

• Purpose: Sends a reminder email one day before the scheduled automatic payout. This email serves as a final reminder about the upcoming payout.
• Trigger: Scheduled to run one day before the automatic payout date.

How to find the actions?

1. Go to WordPress admin > WooCommerce > Status > Scheduled Actions.
2. Search to find the two actions: afwc_send_automatic_payout_email_notification_1 and afwc_send_automatic_payout_email_notification_2.

Note: If you run the action manually, it will send the email immediately. So we do not recommend triggering email manually.

For processing automatic payouts to each affiliate, the following action will be scheduled for each affiliate:

afwc_process_automatic_payout

• Purpose: Process automatic payout to each affiliate who is selected for automatic payouts.
• Trigger: Scheduled to run the day you set as the commission payout day as per this setting.

Note: If you run the action manually, it will process the payout immediately.

When the payout is sent, the following things happen:

1. The affiliate receives the ‘Affiliate – New Conversion Received’ email that includes the payout information.
2. The commission status of the referral records for which the payout is sent will be updated from Unpaid to Paid.
3. The payout records will be added under the Payouts tab of the affiliate on the WordPress admin > WooCommerce > Affiliates Dashboard.
4. The payout record is shown for affiliates under the Payout History table on the My Account > Affiliate > Reports tab.

Have a feature request or enhancement suggestion for Affiliate For WooCommerce? Submit a request or send it to us from here.