Enabling your users to become affiliates for your products is now very easy to do inside of MemberVault.
This step-by-step guide will show you how to set everything set up and how to track/pay your affiliates!
Setting Up Products
Go to Affiliates in your left-hand navigation menu and select Settings.
By default, all the products that you created will be added to the 'Products' Not Shared Area':
To activate your Affiliate Center and accept affiliates, you'll need to click the Edit icon next to the products you want to enable your affiliates to share.
Set the status to "Active" to activate that product for Affiliate Tracking.
Next, select your payout type, amount, currency and even supply a message for affiliates about that product.
Payout Type "None" is best used for any of your free products as it will allow your affiliates to share the product and have their affiliate cookie set, but there is no financial payout for conversions on that product.
Payout Type "Percentage" will calculate the payout based on how much the user actually paid for it. So if they used a coupon, the percentage is taken post-coupon.
This only works for products that are using the MemberVault payment system.
Each product has a dedicated payout amount. At this time, you cannot customize your payout amounts by Affiliate - everyone receives the same payout set for that product.
Once you have these settings in place and have at least ONE active product, your users can start sharing your product.
To have access to the affiliate links for your active affiliate products, a person only requires that they have an account within your MV Site. They do not need to 'own' the product they are promoting on your behalf.
Any person who has an account within your MV Site can access your Affiliate Center and promote your products for you using their unique affiliate link for the product.
To learn more about how your people/affiliates access your Site's Affiliate Center and their links, please reference this article:
A few additional notes:
The lifetime of the affiliate tracking cookie is six (6) months or whenever the end-user clearers the cookies from their browser - whatever comes first.
If someone has been shared a link to your product by multiple affiliates, the credit will be given to the affiliate whose link was last clicked.
The tracking cookie is specific to your account and not just the product that is being shared. This means that if someone clicks an affiliate link for your product but decides to buy a different product than what was promoted to them, the affiliate would still receive credit for that purchase - so long as the product purchased was turned 'active' for affiliate tracking.
MV tracking only applies to purchases made using the MV checkout cart. If you are using an external checkout cart system such as ThriveCart, SamCart etc, you will need to use their Affiliate Links in order to track your Affiliate sales.
Generating Reports / Payouts
To access the reporting area for your Affiliate Tracking, go to Affiliates > Reporting in your left-hand navigation menu.
From this area, you can generate a CSV which will allow you to easily bulk pay affiliates via Paypal, or whatever payment system you use.
Payouts are not processed from within your MV site.
Once you've paid everyone, simply click "Mark as Paid". This will clear out your pending commissions, AND your users will see them as paid on their end as well.
Please note: this is version 1 of affiliate tracking and therefore is very basic with several limitations. The main limitation is that this doesn't track recurring payments currently. Our payment system will have to go through some upgrades until we can track that properly. This should work GREAT for users who are running a basic affiliate program or who are brand new to affiliate marketing for their products.
Questions? Reach out to us at hello@membervault.co, within our Facebook group, The MV Collaborative, or via chat support within your admin account (not sure how to log in? look up your account here).