Reference Guide

Marketing

Affiliates

An affiliate is someone that you pay for referring customers to your on-line store. The general process of working with affiliates is:

1. Create an affiliate account which includes:
• A special html link to your store. It can be a link to any page in your store: your store's home page, a specific product page, etc.
• A policy of how much you want to pay the affiliate for a referral. For example, you can pay affiliates a flat rate for each referral, or a percentage of the order total.
2. Your affiliate adds the link that you created to one of their web pages; their blog, personal website, or on-line store. When a customer visits your affiliate's webpage and clicks on the link, Miva Merchant can track:
• That the customer reached your store from a specific affiliate.
• What the customer purchased from your store.
3. Create the payouts. Miva Merchant calculates how much you owe each affiliate.
4. Send money to your affiliates using any method that is convenient for you.
5. Mark the debt as paid.

To Create an Affiliate Account

You can create affiliate accounts in the admin interface, but you can also allow potential affiliates to create their own accounts in your on-line store.

To Create an Affiliate Account in the Admin Interface

1. Go to > Marketing > Affiliates tab.
2. In the Affiliates tab, click Add Affiliate.
3. In the Identification tab:
• Login. This is the affiliate's user name that they will enter to login to their affiliate account in your on-line store. See Marketing > Settings Tab > Affiliate Lost Password Emailt for an example of how affiliates log in.
• Lost Password Email: This is the email address that the affiliate's password will be mailed to if they click the Forgot Password link in your on-line store.
• Password/Confirm Password: The affiliate's password.
• Application Status: The status that you set here will over-ride the store wide value you set in Marketing > Settings Tab > Affiliate Options.
• Pending: No referral commissions are tracked.
• Approved: Affiliate referrals are enabled and are being tracked by the software.
• Disabled: Affiliate referrals are not enabled or tracked.
4. Click
5. In the Info tab, enter contact information for the affiliate.
6. In the Commission tab, describe how much the affiliate should be paid for each referral. The values that you set here for a specific affiliate will override the default settings in > Marketing > Settings tab > Affiliate Options section.
7. The Earnings tab will show a record for every commission that this affiliate has earned. However, you can also use the Earnings tab to manually adjust their earnings.

7.1. In the earnings tab, click Add Adjustment.

7.2. In the Transaction screen:

• Enter an order id to associate the earnings with an order.
• Enter the order amount.
• Enter a value for Earned. This is what you want to pay your affiliate for the transaction.
• Void:
• Void Reason:
• Adjusted Reason:

7.3 When you are done, click

To Create an Affiliate Account in Your On-line Store

Usually your potential affiliates will follow these steps to create their own accounts.

1. Open a browser and connect to your on-line store.
2. Click on the Affiliate Login link.
3. In the Affiliate Login page (AFCL), click the Create Account button.
4. In the Affiliate Create page (AFAD), choose a login, password, and enter your contact information.
5. Click the Save button.

After you click the Save button, the "Commission" column will appear, showing the affiliate's account, current commission, and referral links.

Paying Affiliates

1. Add payouts. Miva Merchant will calculate how much you owe each affiliate. Miva Merchant creates a "payout record" for each of these affiliates which means that they are "ready to be paid".
2. Mark the affiliate payout record as paid.
3. Send payment to each affiliate: You send payment to your affiliates outside of Miva Merchant using check, PayPal, or any other method.

To Pay an Affiliate

1. Go to > Marketing > Affiliate Payouts tab.
2. In the Affiliates Payouts tab, click Add Payout . The Add Payout screen appears.



• Payout Threshold: This is a dollar value that you set in the Payout Threshold field. The threshold tells the system that you don't want to have to pay affiliates until they've earned at least a certain amount of money. In our example above, we set the threshold to $20.00. When we click on the Add Payouts button, the system will ignore any affiliate who has earned less than that.
• Payee Count: The number of affiliates who have earned more than the threshold amount
• Payee Amount: The total amount that you currently owe all affiliates at the payout threshold
3. Click the Continue button. The Payout Details screen displays.



• In the Payout Details screen you can:
• Mark a payment as paid:

1. Click the Processed checkbox, then click Update.

• Mark a payment as void:

1. Click the Void checkbox.

2. Enter a Reason for voiding the payment, if you wish. Your login will automatically be entered in the Voided By field.

3. Click Update

4. In our example, we'll click the Processed checkbox and then click Update. This affiliate is now marked as paid.



5. Confirm that the affiliates are marked as paid.

5.1. Go to > Marketing > Affiliate tab.

5.2. Edit the Affiliate that you just created a payout for.



5.3. Select the Earnings tab. The payout that we just created now shows up.



5.4. Your affiliate can also see a record of the payment by logging into your on-line store:



6. Manually send payment to the affiliate using any means that is convenient, check, PayPal, etc.

To Manually Adjust an Affiliates Earnings

See To Create an Affiliate Account in the Admin Interface.