If you want to charge your affiliates a fee for joining your affiliate program (to be able to promote your products/services and get commissions) and you need an option that automatically disallows affiliates from logging into their accounts if they did not pay a fee, you can use this feature.
The membership subscription manager feature is a tool for keeping track of the membership payments of your affiliates. Status of affiliates with expired subscriptions can be automatically set as pending or declined, so they won't be able to log into their affiliate panels. The feature also contains a free trial option and an option to send various email notifications to merchants and affiliates.
Requirements
you need to track sales with specific data based on which the feature works. So, you need to make sure that:
- you track product ID within a sale/payment,
- you track customer's email within a sale/payment in any data 1-5 sale tracking parameters.
Activate the feature
Membership subscription manager feature is paid extra addon on Pro and Ultimate accounts and you can add it to your account through the My account section. Once the feature is added on your account you can activate it in your merchant panel under Configuration > Features > Membership subscription manager.
Configure the feature
Once you activate the feature, a new configuration section is added to Configuration menu called Membership subscription.
Transaction data field for customer email - choose a sale data 1-5 field in which you are tracking the customer's email from an order/sale.
Transaction data field for customer name - this field is optional and can be used when new affiliate is supposed to be created. Choose a sale data 1-5 field in which you are tracking the customer's name from an order/sale.
Products - here you can add IDs of products for which subscriptions will be checked and the affiliate membership created or extended. Write product ID (one at a time) into the field, choose a time period of how often the product is supposed to be purchased / paid for and click on the "add" button. You can add multiple product IDs with different time periods. Choosing the "Number of days" time period displays a new field where you need to specify the number of days for which the subscription is valid.
Active subscription - choose if you would like to reactivate only pending affiliates or also affiliates in the declined state after purchasing a subscription product.
Expired subscription - decide whether affiliates should be set as pending or declined after their current subscription has expired since they didn't pay the next period's fee on time.
New affiliate - enable this option if you want to automatically create a new affiliate account for a customer that bought a subscription product.
Trial validity - define in how many days the affiliate has to purchase one of the products added in the Products section after creating an account in other ways than by purchasing the mentioned products (e.g. using a standard signup form). After the set amount of days passes, the affiliate will be either set as pending or declined (based on the Expired subscription field).
0 or Undefined means that affiliates do not need to pay a subscription fee and will not be affected by this feature after joining your program. Only after some affiliate purchases any of the subscription products their account would be updated and will be affected by this feature going forward (e.g., set as pending after the subscription expires).
Notifications - you can choose what email notifications will be sent to the merchant and affiliates. You can customize these emails via email templates.
Affiliate data field for subscribed product ID - choose the affiliates profile field into which the product ID of the subscription will be saved. This field can be set as hidden if you'd like.
Affiliate subscription info
In every affiliate's details, you can see the "Subscription expire" field. In this field, there is either:
- "Don't require subscription" option set so that affiliate's status won't be changed by this feature,
- or a specific date and time set on which the affiliate's status will be changed to pending or declined if the affiliate won't make the subscription payment on time.
Subscription refunds
Refunds are processed by this feature as well. It works like this, for example, an affiliate buys a subscription product set as a monthly fee. The date in the "Subscription expire" affiliate field will be set as the day of the purchase + 1 month. If there will be a refund of the affiliate's purchase, the date in the "Subscription expire" affiliate field will be pushed back by one month (the period defined for the subscription product).