Notice: The AffiliateWP Payouts Service described in this post was retired on September 30, 2026, and no longer pays affiliates. Affiliate payouts are now built into AffiliateWP, with Stripe, PayPal, store credit and manual payouts. See Affiliate Payouts, or contact us if you have any questions.
One of the most consistent challenges we have heard from our customers is that it is too hard to pay your affiliates.
There are a number of existing tools in place that try to facilitate processing affiliate payouts, but they are either significantly lackluster or come with certain undesirable requirements. Today I am excited to share that we have been actively working on providing a good solution to this challenge for the last year and are nearly ready to make it available.
We’ve built a payouts service that allows site owners and affiliate managers to effortlessly pay their affiliates in a range of countries (and more coming soon).
The service provides a simple and super easy-to-use way for you, the site owner or affiliate manager, to send commission payments directly to your affiliates via a direct deposit into their bank accounts or debit cards. The process is fast, too, with payments arriving in as little as four days for affiliates in the USA and 1-2 weeks for other countries.
Up ’til now most payout methods have involved generating a payment report and exporting a CSV of the earnings for each affiliate, then manually sending payments to those affiliates. Sometimes this involved PayPal, manual checks, cash, or possibly even pieced-together invoices that your affiliates had to send to you. Regardless of the tool used, it wasn’t simple nor user-friendly, nor was it a good fit for global affiliates from all different countries.
Our new service provides a single, consistent experience, no matter which supported country you or your affiliates reside in, and I’d love to show you a quick preview!
The process is straight-forward:
First, you connect your site to the Payouts Service from inside of AffiliateWP;
Second, affiliates register to be paid from inside their Affiliate Area:
Third, a site admin or affiliate manager for your website initiates a payout from inside AffiliateWP.
Fourth, we send you an invoice for the summed total of the payouts being processed plus a small processing fee:
Once the invoice is paid, we begin dispersing the payments to your affiliates automatically. The process takes 3-14 days depending on the country the affiliate is located in, and throughout the whole process we keep everyone informed of the status with email notifications:
Launch timeframe
We are anticipating releasing this service with AffiliateWP version 2.4, which is currently in active development. In the coming weeks we will be releasing the first beta version of 2.4 that includes this payouts service.
How do affiliates receive their funds?
Affiliates receive their funds as direct deposits in their bank accounts. This takes 3-14 days depending on their country.
What does it cost?
Pricing for the service is simple. We charge 5% 3% + processing fees by our merchant processor. There are no monthly nor annual costs, nor any sign up costs. The only time you pay a fee is when you send a payout to your affiliates. The fee is 5% 3% of the total payout amount + processing fees.
We will have more exact pricing details available soon.
How to sign up
You will be able to sign up for this payouts service directly from inside AffiliateWP as soon as version 2.4 is released.
Learn more
If this is a service that interests you, you can learn more about it and subscribe to our email list to stay up to date from our new dedicated site for the service.
This service has been in progress for nearly a year and I’m thrilled to be able to share it with everyone soon. If you have any questions, I’ll be more than happy to answer them!
Really cool idea! I will definitely give it a try!
1) what about Paypal payouts? Is there a chance to support this as well? (Especially when using mass payouts is not an option for your customers)
2) Many affiliates have demands for payout statements / invoices, for accounting reasons. Do affiliates receive an invoice/statement from your service?
3) Right now im using my own plugin for providing statements/invoices to affiliates ( https://kryptonitewp.com/downloads/payout-statements-for-affiliatewp/ ). Would be great if you let me know, in case there’s something I can build in/adjust to support your service right from start!
Hey Florian, thanks for the questions!
1). PayPal Payouts will be able to be used alongside the Payouts Service. In AffiliateWP 2.4 we have completely rebuilt the payout flow so as to easily support multiple payout methods.
2). Payouts are still shown the same way to affiliates in their Affiliate Area. So at the moment, no, invoices for payouts are not sent.
3). Your plugin should continue to work exactly the same!
Thanks for your reply Pippin.
1.) Ah I meant, if you’re service will support PayPal payouts as well. I could imagine, that there are a lot of affiliates who prefer being paid via PayPal instead of card/bank. This would take away the payout workflow from us to your service as well.
2./3.) Alright!
The service does not support PayPal but you can still use our PayPal Payouts add-on alongside the payouts service.
Hi,
Great explanation. However I recommend you update the screenshots with Payout fees, to show the correct 5% calculation. Right now the pics are showing a higher than 5% Payout fee.
It’s best to keep everything consistent with the messaging. Just my thoughts! 😉
Thanks for noticing the error!
Our processing fee is 5% and our processor, Stripe, Inc, has a transfer fee for moving the funds. The total cost is our 5% + the processing fees.
We’re still working on finalizing the exact pricing and will have a detailed pricing page written soon.
So the final fee will be around 8% in total? We’ll stay tuned for the updates.
Yes, though it can vary from country to country.
We do also have the ability to customize rates for customers based on their needs and volume being processed.
We have the pricing worked out now and you can see it in detail here: https://payouts.sandhillsdev.com/pricing/
This is so cool! I’m delighted to live in a country where this feature is supported.
Here in Finland affiliates will want to have some kind of receipt/statement/invoice/document of the commission received and they will need to have VAT stated in it for accounting purposes. So that will need to be figured out somehow before I can use the feature. Also the payout to affiliates will need to have VAT stated for my accounting.
We are still finalizing how VAT will be taken care of but it is our intention to ensure the system is fully compliant for EU countries.
This is amazing news, thank you so much!
I think I figured out how to take care of the receipts. I could write receipts manually to the affiliates and send them via email when I make the payouts.
Big thumbs up for this feature update! It must be a huge project!
Hello
This sounds fantastic. There’s so many affiliates that would really appreciate this as many are trying to move away from PayPal. but offering them a solution to get payments into their bank account is great.
Is there a list of the supported 24 countries? I’m in South Africa and was wondering if we’re on the list
Thanks for the awesome continued development on this plugin.
Mozie
You can see the full list of countries supported here: https://payouts.sandhillsdev.com
South Africa is unfortunately not yet supported but we will add support for it as soon as Stripe.com is available there.
I love that you’re taking the pain out of the payments process. I’m looking forward to using it when it’s available.
The other pain point is generating and filing 1099s. Will you be delving into those too since Stripe has some features to facilitate that?
We are still finalizing how 1099s will work for US sites and affiliates but yes, we’re absolutely hoping to offer a simple solution for those.
I have a payment gateway in my country.. PAYSTACK
Can i also initiate payout directly through paystack in the coming version?
The service is built in such a way that you, the site owner, do not need to use a payment gateway of any kind for processing affiliate earnings.
So long as you and your affiliates reside in one of the supported countries, all you need to have in order to pay them is a bank account and/or a credit card.
This actually solves the problem I had deciding on an affiliate software years ago.
Back story, I am a Nigerian and we can’t receive payment via PayPal. I wanted to use AffWP so bad but because there is no means for me to pay affiliates, I opted for Shareasale.
Switching to AffWP might be too late as we already have a large number of affiliates promoting us.
I will sure use it as well as the payout service on future products.
Great job Pippins.
Since recently Stripe is available in Poland. Will the Payouts Service make it also possible to pay affiliates in Poland?
Another question I have – do the affiliates and the site owner need to be located in the same country to use the Payouts Service?
Yes, Poland is supported now too! We just finished up adding support for the new countries (including Poland) that Stripe just launched into.
The site owner and the affiliates do not need to be in the same country. They do each need to be in a country that Stripe supports though.
Why not simply add an inegration with TransferWise? They pay to an email account just like PayPal [and in the past Skrill/Moneybookers], and also enable direct deposits to a bank account in ANY country their user has on file. They also provide US/UK/etc checking accounts like Payoneer does to receive funds in same currency [to avoid losing on FX fees].
That’s a great question!
Transferwise is a tremendous service (we use it ourselves for some of our international team and vendors), but they have one major limitation when it comes to building a service like this: they do not provide an API that enables platforms like AffiliateWP to integrate with their system.
The number one goal of this service is to make is super easy for site owners to pay affiliates. While Transferwise does allow for funds to be sent internationally, they do not support being integrated directly into a platform like AffiliateWP, so in the end all we’d be able to do is educate site owners on how to use an external service. We wanted the system to be inside of AffiliateWP so we could make it as frictionless as possible to use.
I would love to see feature this too! TransferWise is cheap, fast, and user friendly. The PayPal Payouts is the best option for me at the moment but I would much rather use Transferwise!
I think Transferwise integration is a great idea and would be so useful.
It looks like they now provide an API – would this work?
https://api-docs.transferwise.com/#transferwise-api
Tom,
It’s definitely possible to build a TransferWise payouts integration now and it’s something we have considered. We haven’t worked on it yet but may in the future.
Is there any integration done yet with transferwise (now Wise)?