Affiliates

The Affiliates tab allows you to configure the WHMCS affiliate system. Affiliates help generate revenue by referring customers to your business. Affiliates can receive commissions, initiate withdrawals, and view live statistics and information on their referrals in the Client Area.

The Affiliates tab in General Settings

You can access this tab at Configuration () > System Settings > General Settings.

You can override these settings on a per-affiliate basis at Clients > Manage Affiliates.

Enable/Disable

Check to enable the affiliate system. Activated affiliates will receive rewards when they refer new customers to you using their unique affiliate link.

Affiliate Earning Percentage

Enter the default percentage to pay as commission on all products. For example, if you set this to 5, the affiliate will earn 5% of each invoice that their referred customer pays to you.

You can override this commission at the product level and individual affiliate level so that different commissions apply for specific cases.

Affiliate Bonus Deposit

Enter the default amount to set as a new affiliate’s starting balance when they join your affiliate program. This allows you to offer an incentive to new affiliates and lets them reach their first withdrawal level more quickly.

Affiliate Payout Amount

Enter the minimum balance amount to allow affiliates to withdraw their commission balance (for example, requiring a balance of $50 or more in order to make a withdrawal).

When a customer’s commission balance is below this level, they cannot withdraw the money and will not see Request Withdrawal in the Client Area Affiliates page.

Affiliate Commission Delay

Enter the number of days between the date of sale and the availability of the commission payment. This helps you avoid paying commission on transactions that customers later dispute or cancel or that you refund within a few days of payment. This setting applies to commissions for both initial orders and renewals.

Set this value to a number of days after which you believe you have received reports on most fraudulent transactions.

  • We recommend a minimum Affiliate Commission Delay value of 1.
  • We recommend setting this to 30 or 60 days.
  • Setting this value to 0 will cause commissions to clear immediately, skipping the Pending status.

At the time of payment, the affiliate’s Pending Commissions Balance value will increase by the amount of commission for the order but their Available to Withdraw Balance value will not. WHMCS only awards commission if the product or service is in the Active status when payout would occur according to your settings.

  • This is either at the end of the delay period or, if you did not set a delay period, immediately.
  • If it is in another status, the system will remove the commission and you must reward it manually.

Affiliate Commission Reversals

In WHMCS 8.3 and later, in addition to the Affiliate Commission Delay setting above, you can perform reversals on commission.

When you refund a transaction at Billing > Invoices that incurred an affiliate commission and uses a payment gateway that supports reversals, one of the following scenarios will occur:

  • If you are giving a full refund, WHMCS will perform the reversal automatically.
  • If you are giving a partial refund, you can choose whether to perform the reversal.

Payout Request Department

Select a support department. When a client requests a commission payout, the system will create a support ticket in this department to process the payout.

Enter the banner codes that your affiliates can use to refer customers to you. Use the displayed instructions to enter these.

general-settings affiliates

Last modified: June 14, 2024