Multi-level Affiliates

With the Multi-level Affiliates add-on, your existing affiliates can invite other people to join your affiliate program and be rewarded extra commissions for sales referred to you by the newly recruited affiliates.

Getting started

To set up your multi-level affiliate program, we’ll need to firstly install the Multi-level affiliates add-on. To do this, please follow these steps:

1. Firstly, navigate to your SliceWP account > File Downloads (tab).
2. Click the Download button next to the Multi-level Affiliates add-on. This will download the add-on’s .zip file to your computer.
3. Then, navigate to your WordPress admin area > Plugins > Add New.
4. Click on the Upload Plugin button located at the top of the page, right next to the page’s title.

   

5. Select the .zip file you’ve just downloaded and click the Install Now button.

   

6. Once the add-on is installed click the Activate Plugin button.

Enabling the multi-level affiliates functionality

Now that you have the add-on active, let’s enable the multi-level affiliates functionality. Here’s how:

1. Navigate to SliceWP > Settings > General (tab) > Multi-level Affiliates (section).
2. Here, switch on the Enable Multi-level Affiliates option and save the settings.

Once you do the above, your affiliates will be able to invite other people to join your affiliate program. When a referred new affiliate joins, they will become the sub-affiliate of the affiliate that referred them.

Understanding how the multi-level affiliates system works

So that you have a clearer image about how this system works, let’s look at the following example.

Let’s say that you already have an affiliate, Maria, that, at this point, is not a sub-affiliate, nor a parent to another affiliate. Now, let’s say that Maria invites Alex, which joins your affiliate program. Maria becomes Alex’s parent affiliate, while Alex becomes a sub-affiliate of Maria. Let’s go a step further and consider that Alex invites Anna. Alex becomes Anna’s parent affiliate, while Anna becomes Alex’s sub-affiliate. If you were to look at the bigger picture, you now have the following affiliate tree:

How do affiliates recruit other people?

Now that you have a clearer view on how the multi-level affiliates system looks like, let’s explore how your affiliates can actually invite other people to join your affiliate program.

The principle is similar to referring sales, but instead of sharing a referral link to your website’s homepage or to a product’s landing page, the affiliate will share a referral link to your affiliate registration page.

Your affiliates can find this new referral link in their affiliate account, under the new Network tab. Alongside the invitation referral link, your affiliates will also have a tree diagram of their sub-affiliates. Here’s how this looks like:

This referral link works exactly like the other referral links. Once a visitor accesses your website through the referral link, a tracking cookie will be set in the visitors browser for the number of days you’ve set in SliceWP’s setting page. If the visitor signs up for your affiliate program while the tracking cookie is active, they will become a sub-affiliate of the affiliate that referred them.

Setting up the affiliate levels and commission rates

With a multi-level affiliate program the goal is to reward parent affiliates for referred sales made by sub-affiliates. To do this, we need to set up each affiliate level and define the commission rates that should be used to calculate the commission that is earned by parent affiliates from their sub-affiliates. Here’s how:

1. Navigate to SliceWP > Settings > General (tab) > Multi-level Affiliates (section).
2. Here, click the Add Level button to add a new level and set the commission rate for the level.
3. Once you’re done setting up all levels, save the settings.

Understanding how commission rates work for affiliate levels

So that you can better understand the way commission are calculated, let’s look at the following example, using the affiliates from the previous example.

Let’s say that Anna refers a visitor that ends up making a $100 purchase from you. As the referrer, Anna will be rewarded a commission that is calculated based on the commission rates set in the general settings section. In this example, we’ll consider that you’ve set a 20% rate for referred sales, which means that Anna will be rewarded a $20 commission for the $100 sale.

Anna, as the referrer is considered Level 0 (zero) in the context of your multi-level affiliate program.

Now, let’s consider that you additionally want to reward the affiliate that invited Anna (Anna’s parent affiliate), but also the affiliate that invited Anna’s parent (the parent’s parent).

In this case, you’ll set up 2 affiliate levels:

• Level 1: 20% commission rate
• Level 2: 10% commission rate

In our example, Alex is Anna’s parent and Maria is Alex’s parent. Because Alex is Anna’s parent, they’re considered Level 1, while Maria, as Alex’s parent, is considered Level 2.

For Level 1, we’ve set a 20% commission rate, which means that Alex will be rewarded a $4 commission. As you can notice, the $4 commission is calculated from Anna’s $20 commission, not from the $100 of the referred sale.

For Level 2, we’ve set a 10% commission rate, which means that Maria will be rewarded a $2 commission (10% of Anna’s $20 commission). This schematic illustrates the above example:

In the end, the total amount you’ll be rewarding affiliates is $26, as follows:

• Level 0: $20 for the referring affiliate
• Level 1: $4 for the referring affiliate’s parent
• Level 2: $2 for the parent of the referring affiliate’s parent