In this article, we will guide you through the Affiliate Platform. This platform empowers users to join as affiliates, promoting your products and earning rewards for each successful sale.
We’ll walk you through each feature, step by step, revealing simple yet impactful ways to maximize your affiliate experience and boost your earnings.
What is an Affiliate Platform?
An affiliate platform is like a meeting place. It connects sellers who want to sell more with people who want to help sell their stuff.
These helpers, called affiliates, earn rewards when they bring in customers or make sales. The platform gives affiliates special links to track their work, making sure they get paid for what they do.
It helps sellers reach more people without spending lots of money upfront. They team up with affiliates who use different online ways to show the seller’s stuff to more folks.
Overall, it’s a win-win: sellers sell more, and affiliates earn rewards for helping them out.
Merchant Settings
Before anything else, you need to configure your affiliate settings where you will define the Affiliate Signups, Referral Tracking, and Commissions and payouts.
Let’s get started.
- To begin, log in to your WordPress dashboard using your credentials.
- Then, navigate to SureCart > Settings, and Affiliates.
Affiliate Signups
This is where you set up how affiliates sign up and get approved to promote products in your store.
- To enable new affiliate signups, toggle the Allow New Affiliate Signups switch.
- Complete the Program Description field. This is where you usually specify how the affiliate program works or how much commission you will provide to your affiliates.
- If you wish to automatically approve new affiliates, simply enable the Auto Approve New Affiliates toggle.
- Click on the Save button in the top right corner of your screen to save your changes.
The Signup URL is where your affiliates will sign up for the affiliate program. To modify it, follow the steps below.
- Login at app.surecart.com and select your store. Then, go to the “Store”.
- Change the Store ID / Subdomain, ensuring it contains only letters, numbers, and dashes. Click the Save button to apply these changes.
- Return to the Affiliates menu, and you’ll notice that your Signup URL has been changed.
- The Signup Question field asks the affiliates questions during the signup process. If you leave it blank, the default question “How will you promote this store?” will be used.
- You can enter the URL to your Terms & Conditions page here. This page will be shown to affiliates after signing up.
- The payout email is where affiliates get their commission payments. If enabled, this will include a separate payout email field on the signup form itself.
Referral Tracking
This is where you’ll set up how clicks are tracked and how affiliates get credit for referrals.
Before we start, let’s clarify some terms.
Referrer Type: This determines which affiliate should get credit for a sale if a customer has clicked multiple affiliate links. The first referrer means the first affiliate link to be clicked will get credit, and the last referrer means the last affiliate link to be clicked will get credit.
Tracking Length: Also known as the “cookie duration”, this is how long a special code (called a cookie) stays on someone’s device after they click an affiliate link. It’s like a small marker that remembers they came from an affiliate’s link.
This time matters because if someone clicks an affiliate link and buys something within that time, the affiliate still gets recognized for the sale.
For instance, if the tracking length is 30 days, it means that if someone clicks an affiliate link and buys something from that store within the next 30 days, the affiliate will receive a commission for that sale.
Tracking Script: The tracking script is a small snippet of code that helps an affiliate platform keep track of who sends customers to a store’s website. The tracking script must be present on all sites where affiliate links should be tracked.
If a store uses SureCart V.2.10.0 or later, they don’t need to worry about setting up this tracking code. It’s handled automatically by the system through a single toggle that can enable or disable it.
Now that you understand how it works, let’s set them up:
- Enable “Tracking” to add a tracking script to this site.
- In the Referrer type, choose which referrer should receive credit. If you prefer the default option, which is Last, there’s no need to make changes. However, if you want the referrer who initiated the first interaction to get credit, click on the dropdown menu and select First.
- Set the Tracking Length in days for when you want to credit the referrer.
- In the Affiliate Referral URL field, enter the address where you want your affiliates to direct traffic.
- Decide whether you want to approve new referrals automatically or not.
Commissions & Payouts
This is where you set up how affiliates earn commissions and receive their payments.
Before we start, let’s clarify some terms.
Commission: A commission is like a “thank you” reward. When someone helps to sell things for a store by bringing in customers or making sales happen, the store gives them a part of the money earned as a way of saying thank you. It’s like getting a bonus for helping out and making sales happen.
Subscription Commissions: A subscription commission is like a repeating thank-you bonus for affiliates. If they bring in customers who sign up for services that people pay for regularly (like every month), the affiliate keeps getting a bonus each time those customers pay.
Lifetime Commissions: Lifetime commissions mean an affiliate keeps getting bonuses for all the shopping a customer does in the future, not just the first time they buy something.
Now that you understand the basics of how it functions, let’s configure the settings.
- Enter the commission amount you wish to pay your affiliates, and then select whether it’s a percentage or a flat rate.
- To reward affiliates for renewal subscriptions, switch on the Subscription Commissions toggle.
- If you wish to limit the time that subscription commissions are awarded, you can set this in the designated field for the number of days. For example, setting the field to 365 would mean that affiliates are only awarded commissions for 1 year after the subscription starts.
- If you don’t wish to limit the time a subscription commission is awarded, you can leave the field blank.
- To reward affiliates for future purchases, switch on the Lifetime Commissions toggle.
- If you prefer to award commissions to the affiliate for a specific period after a customer’s purchase, you can set this duration in the number of days.
- If you wish to provide commissions indefinitely, you can leave the field blank.
Note: You can also pay an affiliate for every purchase or subscription renewal that a customer makes. Check out this article for more details on the same.
- Finally, write a Payout Instruction so that your affiliates understand your terms and conditions for receiving their payments.
Managing the Affiliates
Managing the Affiliates is quite simple. On the left menu, click on Affiliates. Presently, we have only four primary menus:
- Requests
- Clicks
- Referrals
- Payouts
Requests
When affiliates sign up using the form mentioned above, you’ll see a new request in your WordPress dashboard.
- You can find these requests at SureCart > Affiliates > Requests.
- You can approve, deny, or delete the request by clicking on the affiliate’s name and the Actions dropdown menu.
Once the affiliate is approved, they will receive an email notifying them that their affiliate request has been approved.
The affiliates need to click the “Go to Affiliate Portal” button in the email, then verify their email by entering a code received in the same email.
Once your affiliates enter and verify this code, they’ll be redirected and logged into their affiliate portal. This portal will have “https://your-store-id.surecart.com/affiliates” as the URL.
Affiliates will use this platform to share and track the referrals they make to customers. We’ll discuss the affiliate dashboard in detail in the last section.
Clicks
These are all the clicks made through a specific affiliate’s unique URL.
For instance, if an affiliate shares their special link and people click on it, you can see the updates in real-time here.
This section includes the affiliate’s name and their special URL so that you can see which affiliate is drawing in more clicks.
You can select to view All, Converted, or Not Converted clicks by clicking on the corresponding tab.
Referrals
A referral happens when customers click on an affiliate’s special URL and make a purchase in your store.
- You’ll be notified about this referral at SureCart > Affiliates > Referrals.
- You can approve, deny, edit, or delete this referral here based on your preferences.
Optionally, you can enable this option to track your referrals in test mode. This is useful if you want to test how your affiliate process works before making it live.
Payouts
Every approved referral deserves a fair commission for the affiliate.
To process these commissions, go to the Payouts in your WordPress dashboard and follow these steps:
- Navigate to SureCart > Payouts, and click on the Add New button.
- Select the affiliate candidate you want to pay along with the end period for processing the payout.
Click on the Create button once done. SureCart will generate a list of all payouts that meet the specified criteria and assign them the Processing status.
The Affiliate Portal
On the affiliate portal, affiliates can view all their metrics. When they log in to their account, they can see an overview of the main metrics displayed.
This affiliate portal will have “https://your-store-id.surecart.com/affiliates” as the URL.
- Affiliates will promote your store using a special link they’ll receive. They can find it under Settings.
- Your affiliate can also enter the payout email where they wish to receive the payout.
That’s it! Hope this article was helpful. If you need more information, please feel free to reach out to us.
