From In-Portal User Manual

Affiliate Plans

This section is used for creating and managing the affiliate plans. An Affiliate plan is a combination of rules used for affiliate commission calculations and payment terms. In-commerce supports two types of affiliate commission calculation – by amount and by item.
The “By amount” type is used for calculating commission based on the total order amount generated by the affiliate. The “By item” type is used for calculations based on the total number of items sold. For both types, the commission amount is calculated as a percentage of total amount of all orders. This percentage depends on the commission bracket configuration. For commission type “By amount” ,the percentage will be determined by matching the total amount of all orders with the corresponding commission bracket. For commission type “By item”, the match will be performed on the total number of items sold. Both types use the cumulative amounts/items over the designated period. For example, if an affiliate plan uses “By amount” calculation, and is set to the period of one month, the commission percentage for all orders will be selected based on the cumulative order amounts during the calendar month. Suppose the brackets are set to pay out a commission of 10% for sales between $0 and $1,000 of the total order amounts, and 15% for $1,000 and more. In this case, the affiliate will first receive 10% commission for all the orders, until the cumulative order total reaches $1,000. If the affiliate exceeds $1,000 in sales during the calendar month, his or her commission for all the orders made since the beginning of the month will also be recalculated based on the 15% bracket. This system allows site administrator to create a flexible structure of the affiliate commissions, motivating the affiliates to generate more revenue for every given period, more sales that an affiliate generates results in a higher commission percentage awarded.

The section displays the grid of all affiliate plans in the system with the following fields – Name, Plan Type, and Status.

The toolbar of the section allows the following actions:

• New Affiliate Plan – creates a new affiliate plan
• Edit – opens the affiliate plan edit form for the selected item
• Delete – deletes the selected affiliate plans after confirmation
• Clone – duplicates the selected affiliate plans. Administrator may use this function to create new affiliate plans based on already existing ones
• Set Primary – designates the affiliate plan as primary, only one affiliate plan should be selected to use this option. Newly registered affiliates are automatically assigned to the primary affiliate plan
• Approve – changes the status of the selected affiliate plans to enabled
• Deny – changes the status of the selected affiliate plans to disabled
• View – opens the view menu