Paying affiliates with the AffiliateWP Payouts Service

Paying your affiliates should be easy. To help make the process of paying your affiliates their earnings, AffiliateWP offers a complete Payouts Service that makes paying your affiliates fast and hassle-free. Seamlessly pay affiliates in 50 countries and in 130+ currencies.

The Payouts Service is a service provided by Sandhills Development, the company that owns and maintains AffiliateWP. You can learn more about the features and pricing of the payouts service here.

To pay your affiliates through the Payouts service, you’ll need to do three things:

1. Register your site with the Payouts Service
2. Enable the Payouts Service on your site
3. Instruct each of your affiliates to register their payment details from inside their Affiliate Area

Once each of those steps is completed, you will be able to submit payouts via the service.

Registering your site

To register your site with the Payouts Service, follow these steps:

1. Log in to your WordPress dashboard
2. Navigate to AffiliateWP » Settings » Payouts Service
3. Click the link that says Connect to the AffiliateWP Payouts Service

You will be taken to a screen that asks for basic information about website:

After you have filled out the requested information and click Connect Site, you will be redirected back to your AffiliateWP settings screen that shows your site is successfully connected.

Enabling the Payouts Service

Once your site is connected to the Payouts Service, you can enable it by checking the box next to Enable Payouts Service.

When the Payouts Service is enabled, affiliates will be given the option to register their payment details inside of the Affiliate Area.

Besides enabling or disabling the Payouts Service, there are two additional settings available:

1. Registration Form Description – This allows you to enter a message (including custom HTML) that will be shown to affiliates above the payment registration form. This can be used for informational purposes to help explain to affiliates why they need to register or how their payouts will be received.
2. Payouts Service Notice – This allows you to enter a message (including custom HTML) that will be shown at the top of the Affiliate Area to any affiliate that has not successfully registered their payment details.

Here’s an example of how you might use the Payouts Service Notice:

That will result in a message that looks like this (exact appearance is dependent on your theme):

Affiliate payment registration

In order for your affiliates to be paid through the Payouts Service, each active affiliate needs to register their payment details. Your affiliates can register their payment account by logging in to the Affiliate Area then clicking on the Settings tab. On that screen they will be shown a registration form if they have not yet registered:

To register their account, the requested information needs to be filled out and the form submitted. Upon submitting the form, the affiliate will be taken to a screen that looks like this:

Here they will enter their bank account or debit card information for where they wish their affiliate earnings to be deposited. Once their payment details are submitted successfully, they will be returned to the Affiliate Area on your website and shown a screen like this:

If at anytime the affiliate wants to change the bank account or debit card attached to their account, they can click the link shown after the Want to change your payout method?. That will send the affiliate an email with instructions on how to change their payout destination.

Processing Payouts

After your site is connected to the Payouts Service and your affiliates have registered their payment details, you can begin processing payouts. To submit a payout, log in to your WordPress site’s dashboard and navigate to AffiliateWP » Referrals and click Pay Affiliates:

You will be taken to a screen where you can set the parameters for the payout you wish to process. The following options are available:

• Affiliate – This field allows you to select a single, specific affiliate to pay. If you wish to pay all affiliates, leave this field blank.
• Start Date – This lets you define the earliest referral date to include in the payout.
• End Date – This lets you define the latest referral date to include in the payout.
• Minimum Earnings – This allows you to specify the minimum amount of unpaid earnings an affiliate must have in order to be included in the payout.
• Payout Method – This lets you select how the affiliates will be paid. Choose Payouts Service.

Click the Preview Payout button to see the total earnings that will be paid out, all associated fees, and which affiliates are to be paid. If you have affiliates that have not registered through the Payouts Service, you will also be shown a list of those affiliates. This can be useful if you wish to manually reach out to them to encourage them to register.

Click the Submit Payout button at the bottom of the screen. You will now be taken to an invoice for the summed total of the payout plus processing fees. As soon as the invoice is paid, our system will begin processing the payout and dispersing funds to the recipient affiliates.

That’s it! You are done!

The Payouts Service will disperse all earnings to affiliates within 2-14 days and each affiliate will be notified when their earnings are deposited.