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 at app.surecart.com using your credentials.
- Choose the Store you wish to manage the affiliate for from the top left corner of your screen.
- In the main Settings menu, click on 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.
- In the Settings menu, select the General option.
- Change the Store ID / Subdomain, ensuring it contains only letters, numbers, and dashes. Don’t forget to click the Save button to apply these changes.
- Return to the Affiliates menu, and you’ll notice that your updated Signup URL has been changed.
- The Signup Question field is used to ask 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 the basics of how it works, let’s proceed to set them up.
- 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.
- Finally, you can activate or deactivate tracking on WordPress by simply toggling the WordPress Plugin Tracking option.
- 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 the Affiliates toggle and click on the first opinion. Presently, we have only four primary menus: Affiliates, Clicks, Referrals, and Payouts.
Affiliates
This is where you can view all your affiliates. You can filter them by Active and Inactive by clicking on the corresponding tab.
If you haven’t enabled the setting to Auto Approve New Affiliates, all new affiliates requiring approval will appear on the Requests tab located in the top right corner.
To handle the affiliate request, click on the affiliate’s name. In the pop-up window that appears, you can choose to Delete, Deny Request, or Approve Request.
Once the affiliate is approved, they will receive an email notifying them that their affiliate request has been approved.
The affiliate must click on the “Register as Affiliate” button in the email, which will redirect them to a screen where they need to click on the “Get Started” button to access the affiliate dashboard.
Clicks
This page displays all tracked clicks, including the referring URL, the affiliate, and conversions. At the top, you’ll find a basic analytics section providing an overview of the most important metrics.
You can select to view All, Converted, or Not Converted clicks by clicking on the corresponding tab.
Referrals
All purchases made through an affiliate link will be displayed here. The merchant can choose to approve, deny, or delete these purchases.
Approved purchases can later receive a payout. At the top, there’s a basic analytics section providing an overview of the most important metrics.
To select an action, click on the three dots menu for the specific referral you want to manage.
You can filter the Referrals by status: All, Reviewing, Approved, Denied, Canceled, Paid by clicking on the corresponding tabs.
Payouts
On this page, the merchant can process the payout for the affiliates. At the top, there’s a basic analytics section providing an overview of the most important metrics.
To create a payout for multiple affiliates simultaneously, click on the “New Payout Batch” button situated in the top right corner of the screen. This action will prompt a pop-up window to appear.
Select the end period for processing the payout.
Now, set the Minimum Payout amount and click on the “Create” button.
The platform will generate a list of all payouts that meet the specified criteria and assign them the Processing status.
You can then click on the three dots menu and choose the desired action: Complete or Delete.
The Affiliate Dashboard
On the affiliate dashboard, affiliates can view all their metrics. When they log in to their account, they can see an overview of the main metrics displayed.
The only setting available for the affiliate is to select the email address where they wish to receive the payout.
Hope this article was helpful. If you need more information, please feel free to reach out to us.
Affiliate Settings On Your WordPress Dashboard
You can do all of these things directly through your WordPress dashboard as well.
To do this, just navigate to SureCart Settings > Affiliates section from your dashboard.
Click on the Save button after making the changes.
Check out this article for detailed information on managing affiliates via your WordPress dashboard.
