People send you customers; you pay them a share. A referral link, a ledger you
can explain, and a page in My Account.
A commission is decided once, when the order is placed, and frozen onto it.
The affiliate and the rate are written at that moment and never worked out
again. A plugin that recomputes later has you lowering your rate and silently
shrinking every pending payout in the shop — including for sales made under the
old terms.
Only the goods count, and only a paid order earns. Commission is worked out
on the line items, net of refunds — not on shipping and not on tax, because
paying a share of the VAT is paying the tax authority’s money to an affiliate.
One order is one commission — in the schema. UNIQUE (order_id) is not an
optimisation; it is the guarantee. WooCommerce fires its status hooks more than
once in ordinary operation, and a check-then-insert in PHP loses that race.
An affiliate is never paid for their own order. Checked two ways — the
account that placed it, and the billing address on it.
Also
- An affiliate’s own dashboard on the Affiliate tab of My Account: their link,
their visits and their figures — and nobody else’s - A commission is reversed, never deleted, when an order is refunded, and
re-stated on what is left when part of it is - Applications approved by a human, from one screen — and somebody turned
down may apply again, back in front of a person - Payouts recorded from the same screen, once you have paid somebody by your
own means
What it deliberately does not do
It does not move money. Recording a payout marks what is owed as paid.
This plugin has no gateway, cannot send anybody anything, and never asks for
a credential that could.
The full edition
Gatemi Affiliates for WooCommerce
is a separate plugin, sold on gatemi.com, that adds a rate for one person,
a referral window of the length you set, and a link to your programme terms
on the application form. This plugin remembers a
referral for 30 days, credits the first referral, and pays everybody the one
programme rate.
Both editions store their data the same way — the same tables, the same
option, the same cookie and meta keys — so upgrading keeps every affiliate,
every link already handed out and every commission earned.
External services
None. This plugin makes no HTTP request of any kind.
Screenshots
The settings screen.