Lifetime Commissions and Linked Customers

Lifetime Commissions / Linked Customers

Solid Affiliate comes with the ability to link a customer to an affiliate so that the affiliate receives commissions on all future purchases by the customer to who they originally referred. We call this feature Lifetime Commissions.

You can enable and configure this feature from Solid Affiliate > Settings.

Overview Video

We recommend watching this video recorded by our team, which walks you through the Lifetime Commissions feature and shows you a live example use case. By the end of the video, you’ll know everything you need to know.

Explanation and benefits

Enabling lifetime commissions for your affiliates will increase the value of your affiliate program. Affiliates will be highly incentivized to refer you customers if they trust that they’ll receive ongoing commissions for the lifetime (or some other duration) of the customer on your store.

You can guarantee your affiliates that they will receive a commission whenever a linked customer makes a purchase, even if the customer clears their cookies or uses an entirely different computer. The affiliate-customer relationship is stored directly in Solid Affiliate. It also works for purchases as guests, using the customer’s email address to link back to the affiliate.

As an admin, you can see which customers are linked to every affiliate in your program, and how many referrals have been generated by each affiliate-customer link.

All these features work automatically when enabled.

Settings and configuration

Enable or disable lifetime commissions. This will enable the creation of linked customers automatically.

Lifetime commissions referral rate. Either leave this to site default to inherit your site referral rate settings, or set an override such as 10%. We recommend site default to keep things simple.

Duration. Set the duration of the link between the customer and the affiliate. This defaults to No Limit.

Only new customers. Use this setting if you want to prevent existing customers from being linked to affiliates. We recommend leaving this setting enabled.

Show affiliates their customers. Use this setting if you want to add a Linked Customers tab to every affiliate’s portal. This will show them an anonymized list of link customers for whom they are actively receiving lifetime commissions. For each linked customer, they will see how many referrals they have made and when the link will expire (if there is an expiration set).

FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions regarding lifetime commissions and linked customers.

If you have a question about this feature please send it to us at team@solidaffiliate.com and we’ll answer it and add it to this list.

1. Does Solid Affiliate support Lifetime Commissions?
   1. Yes! The feature is included, and you can activate it with one click. Absolutely no additional purchase, install, or configuration is necessary..
2. Why should I enable Lifetime Commissions?
   1. It’s entirely up to you whether or not you enable this functionality. If enabled, lifetime commissions serve as a powerful incentive for your affiliates. They are guaranteed to receive commissions whenever their referred customers make additional purchases on your store.
3. Will Lifetime Commissions work with guest checkouts?
   1. Yes! Solid Affiliate will automatically associate the email address used at checkout for any guest checkout.
4. Can I set an expiration for lifetime commissions? For example, 6 months or 1 year?
   1. Yes! You can choose from many default duration limits. You can also delete or edit any linked customers at any time from your admin dashboard.
5. Will affiliates see their lifetime customers within their affiliate portals?
   1. It’s up to you! There is a setting that either shows or hides an additional Lifetime Customers tab from your affiliates’ portals.
6. How are Lifetime commissions different than simply setting the Solid Affiliate cookie lifetime to “unlimited” time?
   1. Lifetime Commissions is a significantly more robust attribution method than setting an unlimited cookie. Once a customer is linked to an affiliate, the attribution will work even if the customer orders from an entirely new computer or clears all their browsing cookies.
7. If a customer that is linked to Affiliate #1, buys a product from a link of Affiliate #2, both affiliates will receive $? Like Affiliate #1 the lifetime commission and Affiliate #2 the product commission?
   1. Only the linked Affiliate #1 will receive the commission. The Lifetime Commissions is higher priority than an affiliate link or coupon or landing page…etc commission. We’ve added this as an FAQ here https://docs.solidaffiliate.com/lifetime-commissions/

      ————

      There is only one way within Solid Affiliate for multiple affiliates to receive a commission on the same purchase: Auto Referrals. This is an awesome feature (that no other plugin we know of has) that allows you to model revenue-sharing / royalties within Solid Affiliate. You can configure a situation such as “Every time product X is purchased, no matter what, award a commission to Affiliate Y with a commission rate of Z.” This is super useful if you have a marketplace or a partner that deserves some % or flat $ for every purchase of a specific product(s).

      You can read a bit more about Auto Referrals here: https://docs.solidaffiliate.com/testing-solid-affiliate/#testing-the-auto-referral-feature