Paying your affiliates with store credit

With SliceWP you have the option to pay out your affiliates’ commissions with virtual credit. Your affiliates will then be able to use their credit to make discounted purchases from your store.

Here’s everything this article covers:

1. How the affiliate store credit system works
2. How to set up store credit payouts
3. How to pay your affiliates with store credit

How the affiliate store credit system works

To illustrate how the entire system works, let’s consider the following example.

Let’s say you have an affiliate, Dwayne Johnson. Dwayne refers a few visitors to your store, which end up purchasing from you. Because the referred visitors converted to paying customers, Dwayne receives a commission for each successful sale. Let’s say the commissions total $48.

At this point, you have the option to send Dwayne the owed $48 via bank transfer or via PayPal, or add this amount to Dwayne’s store credit balance.

Let’s say you go with the latter and you pay Dwayne with store credit. When you do this, all of Dwayne’s unpaid commissions will be marked as paid and the commissions totals will be added to Dwayne’s store credit balance. If this is the first store credit payout you make to Dwayne, their balance will be $48.

Now, if Dwayne wants to make a purchase from your store, because they have $48 in store credit, they can use it as a discount to their purchase.

Let’s say Dwayne’s cart totals $120. If they apply the $48 store credit, their new cart total will be $72. Once the purchase is complete, Dwayne’s store credit balance is back at $0.

Now that you know how the affiliate store credit works, let’s set it up.

How to set up store credit payouts

To have the store credit functionality available for your affiliate program, please firstly install the Store Credit add-on. If you’re not sure how to install a SliceWP add-on, please click here and follow our step-by-step guide.

Once you have the Store Credit add-on installed, you can have two main flows to pay your affiliates:

1. Pay affiliates by default with store credit.
2. Pay only certain affiliates with store credit.

Let’s go over both flows.

Pay affiliates by default with store credit

With SliceWP, you can set a default payout method for your affiliate program. You can also edit any affiliate and set their preferred payout method individually.

By default, your affiliates don’t have a preferred payout method set for their account. This means that when you want to pay your affiliates, all payments will be processed through the default payout method you have set for your affiliate program in SliceWP > Settings.

If you set the default payout method to Store Credit all of your affiliates’ unpaid commissions will be paid in store credit when you process a payout.

Here’s how you can set your default payout method to store credit:

1. Navigate to your WordPress admin dashboard > SliceWP > Settings > General (tab) > Payouts Settings (section).
2. Here, set the Default Payout Method option to Store Credit.
3. Lastly, save the settings.

With these settings, when you generate and process a new payout (discussed below), all of your affiliates that are due for a payment, excluding the ones that have another payout method set, will be paid in store credit.

Pay only certain affiliates with store credit

The same way you can set Store Credit as your default payout method, you can set for example PayPal Payouts.

Let’s consider that you have PayPal Payouts set as the default method. This means that all your affiliates’ unpaid commissions will be paid via PayPal, unless you’ve set another payout method for certain affiliates.

Now let’s consider that you want to pay certain affiliates with store credit. To do this, you’ll have to set the Payout Method for each of these affiliates to Store Credit. Here’s how:

1. Navigate to your WordPress admin dashboard > SliceWP > Affiliates.
2. Search for the affiliate and click to edit the affiliate.
3. Set the payout method to Store Credit.
4. Lastly, save the changes.

Let’s say you’ve made the above changes only to your affiliate, Dwayne Johnson.

Considering you have PayPal Payouts as your default payout method, when you process affiliate payments, all your affiliates, except Dwayne, will be paid via PayPal. Dwayne on the other hand, because you’ve set Store Credit as their preferred payout method, will be paid in store credit.

How to pay your affiliates with store credit

Now that you have all the ins and outs of how the store credit functionality works and how you can set it up, let’s process a payout and see how you actually pay your affiliates with store credit.

Let’s consider that you have 8 affiliates. By default, you want to pay all affiliates with store credit. However, you have 2 more high quality affiliates that you wish to pay monetarily, through PayPal.

Knowing this, you end up with the following setup:

1. You set the Default Payout Method in SliceWP > Settings to Store Credit.
2. You set PayPal Payouts as the payout method for the 2 high quality affiliates.

Generate a new payout

Now let’s consider that it’s the first of the month and you decide to pay your affiliates for all unpaid commissions. To do this, let’s firstly generate a new payout and see which affiliates need to be paid. Here’s how:

1. Navigate to your WordPress admin dashboard > SliceWP > Payouts > Create Payout. Here, we’re going to consider that we want to pay all unpaid commissions, no matter the date or the minimum amount for the payment.
2. Next, click the Preview Payout button. SliceWP will generate a report with all the affiliates that have unpaid commissions, the number of unpaid commissions included in each affiliate payment, the total amount due to each affiliate and the payout method that will be used when processing the payment. As you can notice, for our example, there are 6 affiliates payable with Store Credit and 2 with PayPal Payouts. If the report looks good, click on the Create Payout button.

Process the payout’s affiliate payments

Now that you created a new payout, it’s time to process the payments (that make up this payout) to your affiliates. You can do this in two ways. Either individually, payment by payment, or in bulk.

Here’s how you can pay a single affiliate with store credit:

1. From the Payments table found in the payout page, click the 3 dots element to open the actions available for the affiliate payment.
2. Click on the Pay in Store Credit link.
3. A confirmation pop-up will show up explaining what happens next behind the scenes. To pay the affiliate in store credit simply confirm the action.

If you confirm the action, the payment will be marked as paid, the payment’s amount will be added to the affiliate’s store credit balance and all associated commissions to the payment will be marked as paid.

Processing affiliate payments one by one can be time consuming though, so you may want to process all store credit payouts in one go.

Here’s how you can process all payments in bulk:

1. From the Payout Progress panel found in the payout page, select the Store Credit payments option of the Bulk process… field.
2. Once you select an option in this field a notification with details about the bulk process will appear. If all looks good, click the Pay Affiliates button.
3. A confirmation pop-up will show up explaining what happens next behind the scenes. To bulk pay all store credit affiliate payments simply confirm the action.

Once you confirm the action, all affiliate payments that had the payout method set to store credit will be marked as paid and all associated commissions to these payments will also be marked as paid. Lastly, the amounts for each affiliate payment will be added to each affiliate’s store credit balance.