Commission status

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All the commissions generated by the orders of the site are stored in the “Commissions” section of the options panel of the plugin. There is also the possibility to export the commissions in CSV format.

The commission status is strictly linked to the order status.

When the order is created, the commission is created with the “Not Confirmed” status and when the order goes to Paid, the commission automatically gets the “Pending” status, which means that the commission is ready to be paid.

You can see the commission status as shown in the following screenshot.

Here is a more detailed list with all the statuses that a commission can get and which order status can trigger it:

‘pending‘: if the order status goes to completed or processing
‘pending-payment‘: this status is not triggered by any order, it can only be triggered by automatic payment and will be like this until the payment is not confirmed by the gateway
‘paid‘: this is the status that takes when the automatic payment is confirmed or that you can assign for manual payments
‘not-confirmed‘: if the order status goes to pending or on-hold
‘cancelled’: if the order status goes to cancelled or failed
‘refunded‘: if the order status goes to refunded

You can edit the commissions’ status in bulk to any of the following:

Pending
Not Confirmed
Cancelled
Refunded
Trashed: this is the step before a commission is deleted permanently (new “trash” label will appear).

Please, note: when the commission is on pending payment or paid status, it can only be changed to Trashed. No other status change is allowed to prevent that a commission is erroneously paid twice.

The commission can be paid only when it’s on “Pending” status.

The payment of the commission can be done either manually or automatically thanks to the integration with PayPal:

if manually, you can issue the payment to the affiliate offline and then change the commission status to Paid
if automatically, based on the settings, the commission status will automatically go to Paid as soon as the payment is done.

Go to this page of the documentation to get the information about the management of the commission payment.

Example: a commission standard life cycle

This is the default life cycle of a commission, and the statuses it takes on:

order created > commission not confirmed
order completed > commission pending
commission paid > commission pending payment (for automatic payments) OR paid (for manual payments)
commission payment confirmed (only for automatic payments) > paid.

Referral commission note in single product page

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If the order has been associated to an affiliation, you can have access to the order detail page to check the commission percentage.

Payment list

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All the payments are registered in Affiliates -> Payments.

Each time a commission is paid, a new payment is registered in the table.
If the commission has been set to “paid” manually, the payment will be generated with the status “Completed”. By automatic payments via PayPal, the payment will acquire the “Pending” status until PayPal notifies that the payment has been made.

In order to view payment details, you can click on its ID.

If you need to regenerate the invoice, click on Current invoice profile available in the payment details. From here, you can edit the data in the fields and click regenerate the invoice by clicking on Regenerate invoice.

Payment settings

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Payments of commissions are generally made manually by the administrator. If you want to automate this system, you can go to the “Settings” section of the plugin and choose from the options available in “Payment type”:

Manually
Automatically when reaching a threshold;
Automatically on a specific month date;
Automatically on a specific month date, if a specific threshold is reached
Automatically every day
Let user request payment

Pay only commissions older than: choose the minimum amount of days that will have to pass before the commission will be paid automatically.

Moreover, you can also enable the option “Notify admin” that allows you to notify the administrator via email automatically each time a new payment is made. To learn more about the type of emails you can configure, read this page of the documentation.

Let user request payment

With this option enabled, the affiliate has the possibility to request to withdraw his commissions.

Require invoice: the customer has to create an invoice before the admin will pay him. Since the affiliate is receiving money from the store he will need to send an invoice to the store admin.
Invoice mode: decide how the user should submit the invoice.
Invoice example: type the URL of the example invoice that you want to show to your affiliate.
Company details: give in your company details
Invoice fields: decide which fields are necessary for the customer to add to his invoice.

The affiliate will find a new option in his/her menu where he/she can request a withdraw. In the withdraw screen, the affiliate can decide from-to which date they want to withdraw their commissions.

Pay commissions with PayPal

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PayPal is the payment gateway used by the plugin to automate the payment management for the affiliate commissions. In order to work properly, it is essential to set the right credentials in “Affiliates -> Settings -> PayPal Payment Gateway”.

Enter “username”, “password” and “signature” of your PayPal account. Read more on this page if you are not able to find the credentials required.

To complete commission payments correctly by PayPal, your must necessarily have a “Premier” or “Business” account that has to be set up for “MassPay” service. To allow this, you need to make a request to PayPal customer service.

If you want to check if your plugin is working well with a PayPal test account, you can create a Business account: enter the credentials of the new account and tick the option Enable PayPal sandbox.

You can apply PayPal to all the payments with the “On-Hold” status through the specific button.

How to get referrer ID

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Each affiliate can generate possible visits and purchases on your site every day.
The refer ID which allows associating the user to the affiliate can be recovered in two different ways:

through query string: the user reaches your site through a URL that includes a query string with the affiliate’s refer ID. This is a possible example: http://sitename.it/shop/?ref=13.
The ref variable can be changed freely by the administrators of the site from the plugin settings panel with the “Referral var name” option.
through checkout form: a specific form is inserted in the checkout page. This form allows the user to insert the code of the affiliate who led him/her to the site.

How to add or remove an affiliate from the single order

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How to add a referral on an order

The administrator can manually associate an affiliate with one of the orders where there are no referrals.

Access the order detail page and type in the affiliate name to associate with the order.

Click on the button next to the affiliate input field and the order will be associated with the new affiliate automatically.

Commissions will be generated automatically.

Remove an affiliate referral from an order

When you remove an affiliate from an order, also commissions associated with it are removed.

To remove the affiliate from the order, just click on the x button as shown in the screenshot below.

Cookie settings

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When users visit a site for the first time, by clicking on a link containing the reference of an affiliate, a cookie will be stored in their navigation session.
In “Affiliates -> Settings” you can:

set the cookie expiration
edit the cookie name (yith_wcaf_referral_token by default)
enable the cookie deletion after the user has completed the checkout

In order to keep track of all affiliates that have contributed to letting users reach your site before purchasing, you can tick the option “Enable history storage”.
The affiliate history is saved in the order detail page, generated thanks to one or more affiliates.

Note: if you change the name of the cookie, all the cookies created before that moment will no longer work.

Enabling the option “Referral cookie changes?”, the cookie automatically change if the user visits the site with a different referral link.

Delete affiliation cookie after checkout

The option “Delete affiliation cookie after checkout”, if enabled, allows deleting the unlogged user cookie automatically after they complete the purchase.

Without a cookie, the unlogged user is no longer associated with any affiliates.

Stats

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All statistics about plugin information are gathered in the “Stats” section of the options panel.

The statistics table contains the following information:

Sum of the amounts of the confirmed commissions.
Amount of the paid commissions up that moment.
Overall generated clicks from affiliation activities.
Completed order thanks to affiliation activities.
Conversion average percentage between clicks and purchase orders.

Clicks

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All visits to the site that have been generated by affiliate activities can be stored in the section “Clicks”.

For each element shown in the list, the following information is stored:

Referrer: username of the affiliate associated to user’s click.
Order: in case a visit converts into a purchase order, the order ID is stored here.
Followed Url: URL through which the user has reached your site.
Origin Url: URL of the page where the user found a link to your site.
Date: date of the click.
Conversion time: time from click to purchase (only if this order has actually been generated).
The time displayed here is counted from the first time that the click has been registered to the moment in which the order has been completed.

In “Affiliates -> Settings” you will find the specific options to set the click behavior.

In compliance with GDPR, the plugin allows choosing whether to enable or not the clicks registering. When enabled, you can specify through the option Hit Resolution, the time lapse (in seconds) in which clicks made by the same user are counted as one.
The option Auto delete click log allows you to activate automatic deleting of clicks. Set the number of days back, before which clicks have to be deleted.

The last option, Auto delete older click, allows setting the number of days after which a click must be deleted.