Photo credit: David Singleton via Flickr

If you are using aMember version 4 and getting ready to pay affiliates, you may find there are no commissions to pay. The good news is, it is not a bug but a setting. By default, aMember sets commissions to be delayed by 31 days. So any sale that is less than 31 days old is not included in the report. If you had no commission-able sales older than 31 days, aMember assumes no commissions are to be paid.

To protect yourself, a 30 or 31 day delay on commission payments isn’t such a bad idea. There have been merchants who lost a lot of money on fraudulent sales. The fake sales were made using stolen credits cards through an affiliate URL. So the merchant is already out of the money from the stolen card but since they had paid the affiliate their commissions, it’s a double whammy.

Of course, if you have an established affiliate program and change your payment terms, you will want to give your affiliates a good explanation and some time to get used to the idea.

Anyhow, in aMember, changing the delay to 0 will allow you to generate commission payments.