Managing an affiliate program can be time-consuming, especially when you’re manually adjusting payouts, reviewing refund rates, and tracking performance. This affiliate automation feature changes the game by letting you manage and automate affiliate payouts with ThriveCart’s behavior rules.
Whether you’re looking to reward your top affiliates or minimize risk from underperforming ones, ThriveCart’s behavior rules gives you the flexibility and power to make it all happen automatically with just a few clicks.
Setup affiliate automation rules
In this article, we’re going to look at our commission management specifically and some of our affiliate ThriveCart automation rules and how they can help you automate processes in your business all managed under your Affiliates > Rules area.
Specifically, we’re going to look at a couple of scenarios for your well-performing affiliates and those who could probably do a little better (and how to manage both groups automatically without the need to manually change their settings.
The below walkthroughs are just a few suggestions, but the available triggers in your affiliate automation rules include:
- Signs up
- Gets approved to promote a product
- Is rejected from promoting a product
- Makes any sale
- Makes a number of sales – Set a custom number of sales within the last 7 days, 14 days, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, or for All Time
- Refers a certain amount of income – Enter a custom gross or net income value and this rule will trigger once that amount in refunds has been processed for any of their referred customers.
- Has any refund
- Gets a number of refunds – Set a specific number of refunds processed
- Has a particular refund rate – Set a refund percentage within the last 7 days, 14 days, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, or for All Time
Based on the above triggers, you could then choose any of the below actions:
- Use my integration with – to connect to any of your connected integrations such as Slack, Google Sheets, or your desired autoresponder
- Send an email – Specify an email address that will detail the initial action and affiliate ID that triggered this rule
- Send a webhook notification – Send details of the event via webhook
- Add them to another product – Grant additional product access
- Remove them from a product – Remove additional product access
- Add them to all my products – Grants access to all products, with the option to auto approve for all future products as well
- Remove them from all my products
- Change when they are paid – Adjust the timeline for when their commissions become due
- Change how much they are paid – Increase or decrease the commission percentage that they earn on future referrals
- Mark them as a VIP – Set the VIP badge on their affiliate profile
- Remove their VIP status
Example Automated Rules
We’re going to assume for these scenarios that your default setup is to pay out affiliates automatically through the system after 30-days and you have a 50% commission payout for your products.
Note: When affiliate settings are changed, these will affect the commissions of future referrals, existing commissions remain based on the settings at the time of the customer purchasing.
Managing your best affiliates:
Let’s say you want to reward those affiliates who have brought you a specific number of sales or have helped your business earn a specific $ amount in a given time. You can automate improvements to this affiliate relationship based on their performance.
With a couple of clicks, you could create a rule that changes how they’re paid, such as faster payouts for your top affiliates, or paying them a percentage of the commission immediately, whilst paying the rest at a later date… you decide.
Example #1 – Change payout schedule based on sales #
In the below example, we’re going to change our affiliates’ payouts from 30-days to 7-days if they refer 30 sales in a 30-day period for any/all products in the account. So now when an affiliate makes new commissions, they’ll be paid out after 7-days instead of 30.
Example #2 – Change payment schedule based on referred sales $
In this example, we’re doing a similar thing, however we want the change to be based on revenue the affiliate brings to us. If an affiliate sends 10,000 or more in sales to you in a 30-day period, then future commissions will be paid out instantly! Remember, you can also set this to be gross or net. (we use a $ icon to symbolise currency, but if you’re selling in € then it would be €10,000 before the rule triggered).
Example #3 – Set a higher commission percentage
You may want to bump up commissions of those high-performing affiliates to encourage them to promote more. This is great if your industry typically offers lower percentages as you can entice those power affiliates with better rates.
Managing your bad affiliates:
Unfortunately, not every affiliate is a great affiliate and you have to be prepared for those too! These are the affiliates that typically send lower-quality traffic, have high refund rates and can be quite time consuming to manage.
Like above where you can you change when and how much affiliates are paid based on how well they do, you can also do the same based on how many refunds they cause, or if their refund rate goes over a certain percentage.
- Increase the wait time on commission payouts for high refund rate affiliates
- Decrease their commission rates
- Remove them as an affiliate completely
Example #1 – Increase delay in commissions after hitting a refund rate percentage
Below, we’ve set up affiliates so that if they hit a 30% or higher refund rate in a 30-day period, they will be switched to payouts after 60-days for future commissions.
Example #2 – Switching payout method
You could stack rules, so they become progressive, whilst the above triggers at a 30% refund rate you could have another rule trigger at 50% that switches them to manual payouts. Whilst the idea here is to automate things, if you have high refunding affiliates, it’s probably best you review them in more detail before paying.
Example #3 – Reduce how much they are paid
If you don’t want to change when they’re paid, you could just simple change how much they’re paid by reducing the commission rate on what they earn for future referrals.
Example #4 – Remove from product
Then for those really troublesome affiliates, you could remove them from being able to promote your product entirely.
Obviously, these examples detail just some of the power that the affiliate rules in your ThriveCart dashboard provides you, there’s a ton more power and automation available based on the range of events and different actions.