How to set up commissions in AffiliateWP and MemberPress

Table of Contents

Introduction

Overview

Many of our MemberFix customers use affiliate programs on their WordPress membership website. One recent case of interest, involving the affiliate commissions on a site using AffiliateWP was recently brought to our attention by one of our customers.

The WordPress website uses the following plugins:

The MemberPress WordPress membership plugin
The AffiliateWP affiliate plugin for WordPress

Basically the website has two MemberPress membership levels: Monthly (which has a 1 day free trial and then $16.50/month) and Annual (which has a 1 week free trial then $99/year). Our customer wanted to have the below structure for the affiliates commissions:

1. Trial Transactions – affiliates get paid $0.00
2. Monthly Subscription Transactions – affiliates get paid $8.25
3. Annual Subscription Transactions – affiliates get paid $25

The problem was that, initially, the referral rate type was set up as Flat, which created confusion because every free trial transaction was considered as a paid one and the affiliates were receiving either $8.25 or $25. So, the first step was to set up the referral rate type as Percentage(%), but not before you make sure that AffiliateWP is integrated with MemberPress like in the below image:

Select Percentage(%) as the referral rate type for AffiliateWP

You need to go to Affiliates > Settings > General and just select Percentage for Referral Rate Type:

One particular issue on this customer’s website was brought to our attention and that was that she awards all affiliates a $25 commission on all members they refer to our Annual Membership, whether or not the referred member uses a coupon code during checkout.

This means that since the Annual subscriptions costs $99 then the price which new users will pay is $74 and the affiliate commission will be calculated based on this amount.

And here the problem appeared because in the case that users do not use the coupon, then the amount they pay is $99 and the commission for the affiliate will be bigger than $25 (which is how much affiliates get for Annual Subscription transactions). In short, AffiliateWP only allows us to set a percentage-based referral fee, so we have to manually adjust the commissions for any referrals to our Annual Membership which do NOT equal $25.

Calculating and adding the percentage referral rates to MemberPress memberships

This should be an easy step since we already know the amounts which affiliates should get for Annual or Monthly transactions. The referral rate for Monthly will be 50. Why? Because the Monthly membership costs $16.50 and the commission which referrals should get is $8.25. So 50% * $16.50 = $8.25.

For the Annual membership the referral rate will be 33.79% (33.79% * $74 = $25).

The beauty of having percentage based referral rates is that for all Trial transactions the affiliates will get $0. Since the Trial is free and costs $0, then 50% of $0 is, of course, $0! (And, 33.79% of $0 is also $0). In this use case our customer did NOT want her affiliates to receive a commission on a trial sale; only on positive dollar amounts. So this configuration produces the correct behavior.

We are almost done, but we need to address what I wrote above about how to manually change the affiliate commissions for users who do not use the $25 coupon.