How to create affiliate commission plans

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.

How to set up a storewide commission rate? How to assign a higher or lower commission rate than the storewide commission rate to some affiliates? How to assign commissions based on product categories?…

Affiliate for WooCommerce plugin allows you to create all the above and other use cases by creating a commission ‘Plan’.

Whether you want to assign different commissions for different products, assign commissions based on product categories, assign commission only on the first product and not other products in a sales order, and many other scenarios…create an affiliate commission plan, set rules and you are good to go.

Create a commission plan

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Now, let’s see how to create a commission plan:

1. Go to your WordPress Admin panel > WooCommerce > Affiliates. Click on Plans at the top. The dashboard will show all your commission plans.
2. A default ‘Storewide Default Commission’ plan will be created for you. Click on it. Set a percentage or flat rate commission that will be applicable by default. In the same plan, under ‘NO OF TIERS’, keep the value ‘1’ if you don’t want a tiered commission. Click on Save.
   Note – Storewide Default Commission plan is a mandatory one and it should not be deleted.
3. Now to create a new commission plan, click on the ‘Add a Plan’ button at the top right. It will open up a ‘slide over panel’.
4. Under ‘NAME’, give an appropriate title to the commission plan you want to set up.
5. Under ‘COMMISSION’, from the drop-down, select Percentage (%) or Flat (store currency) for percentage commission or flat rate commission respectively and enter the amount. In terms of flat-rate commission, the commission will be applied per order. So if the order total is less than the commission rate, the affiliate will still get the set commission rate for that order.
6. Next to ‘COMMISSION’, you’ll see the ‘WHEN’ option. Use it to validate multiple rule groups within a commission plan.
7. You can select ‘all’ or ‘at least one” from the dropdown for the ‘WHEN’ rule to validate a condition. As the name suggests, ‘all’ means all conditions should be satisfied. For ‘at least’, a minimum of one condition should satisfy. It’s your familiar AND (all), OR (at least) rules.
8. The same applies to individual rule groups under “This group is a “pass” when”. Choose ‘all’ or ‘at least one” from the dropdown.
9. Now within each rule group, you can set up multiple rules.
10. Select Affiliate / Affiliate Tag / Product / Product Category from the drop-down. Use ‘any of’ to include affiliates/tags/products or product categories you want to apply commission for. Use ‘none of’ to prevent the commission calculation with specified affiliates/affiliate tags/products or product categories.
11. You can search by affiliate name, affiliate tag, product and product category. Type your desired queries and you’ll see some results. Select the ones you want.
12. Click on ‘Add a condition’ to add multiple rules within the same group if required. Use the ‘minus’ sign to remove a condition.
13. Click on ‘Add another group’ to add a new rule group if required. Click on the ‘Remove this group’ option to remove a rule group.
14. First, all conditions within a rule group will be checked. And then, conditions between two or more main rule groups will be checked as set under ‘WHEN’.
15. Under ‘NO OF TIERS’, enter a number based on how many tiers you want for this commission plan. Learn more: How to set up a multilevel referral/multi-tier affiliate program
16. When you have set the rule groups, you need to set options as to how to apply commission rates for an order with multiple products. These products may or may not be included in the rule groups.
    1. Under APPLY TO:
       1. If you select ‘all matching products in the order’, it means the commission amount will be calculated for all the products that come under this commission plan conditions.
       2. If you choose ‘only the first matching product’, it means the commission amount will be calculated only for the first matching product that comes under this commission plan conditions.
    2. For remaining products in the order, the below rules will apply under “AND THEN, FOR REMAINING PRODUCTS IN THE ORDER…” **
       1. continue matching commission plans – the plugin will match any other commission plan and the affiliate will receive a commission based on what is set in that plan
       2. use default commission – affiliate will receive the storewide set commission value
       3. apply zero commission – add 0 commission
17. Select ‘Active’ from the drop-down at the top to publish the plan.
18. Click on the ‘Save’ button.

Your commission plan is now live.

** Note: ‘AND THEN, FOR REMAINING PRODUCTS IN THE ORDER…’ means – If there are four products in an order and the current commission plan matches with one product, then for the remaining three unmatched products, any of the three rules mentioned above will be applied. If any rule does not match, the storewide commission will apply.

Edit / Pause / Delete commission plans

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1. Go to your WordPress Admin panel > WooCommerce > Affiliates. Click on Plans at the top. Select any plan to edit it.
2. To pause a plan, use the ‘Draft’ option from the drop-down at the top and click on the Save button.
3. Use the delete icon which is to the right of the ‘Save’ button to delete a plan.

Sorting commission plans

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While calculating affiliate commission, plans are validated one after the other, starting from the top to bottom, present on the Affiliates dashboard under the Plans.

Consider a case where there are two commission plans applicable – a $50 commission and a 25% commission. Both the plans are arranged one below the other under the Plans section, with the $50 commission plan at the top.

Now, if you want to apply the 20% commission plan first and then apply the $50 commission plan, arrange the plans accordingly by simply moving the plans above/below one another.

Here’s how to sort commission plans:

1. Go to your WordPress Admin panel > WooCommerce > Affiliates. Click on Plans at the top.
2. Use the drag-and-drop functionality to arrange the commission plans as you wish to.
3. Click on ‘Save Order’ once done.

Note: The storewide default commission plan will always be at the bottom and won’t be sortable.

Commission plans examples

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Consider we have chosen a Plan like this:

1. Commission – 30%
2. WHEN – all condition group pass
3. This group is a “pass” when – all of the following conditions are true.
4. Affiliate – John or Chris
5. Product – Red Hoodie
6. NO OF TIERS – 1
7. APPLY TO – only the first matching product
8. AND THEN, FOR REMAINING PRODUCTS IN THE ORDER…- apply zero commission

This means when a customer purchases a red-colored hoodie and glares in a single order using John’s affiliate link, John will get a 30% commission on the hoodie but zero commission for the glares.

Consider the same example above with a slight change. We have chosen a Plan like this:

1. Commission – 30%
2. WHEN – all condition group pass
3. This group is a “pass” when – all of the following conditions are true.
4. Affiliate – John and Chris
5. Product – Red Hoodie
6. NO OF TIERS – 1
7. APPLY TO – all matching products in the order
8. AND THEN, FOR REMAINING PRODUCTS IN THE ORDER…- use default commission

This means when a customer purchases a red-colored hoodie and glares in a single order using Chris’ affiliate link, Chris will get a 30% commission on the hoodie and a storewide commission (say you have set it at 20%) for the glares.

Feature request

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