Commission groups allow you to set different commissions for different affiliates, in the same campaign.
This allows you to have some affiliates earning a different commission than other affiliates, or it can add a performance criteria to your program (for example give 20% commission if an affiliate refers less than 5 sales, and 30% if he refers 5 or more sales).
Activating the feature
The feature has to be activated first in your merchant panel under Configuration -> Features
Search for Commission Groups, then click the Activate button.
Now there will be a new tab for "commission groups" when you edit a campaign.
How it works
Each campaign starts with a default commission that is used by each affiliate in that campaign.
If you want some affiliates to receive a different commission for that campaign, you should create a new commission group.
Only affiliates that you manually add to this commission group will get that commission, the rest of the affiliates will receive the default commission.
You can create multiple commission groups for each campaign, each with its own set of commissions. If an affiliate is not in any group, he will just get the default commission.
Creating a commission group
Navigate to the Campaign manager and edit a campaign. You'll see a new tab for Commission groups. There you can create and view all your commission groups.
Click the Add button to create your first commission group.
First name the group, then set the priority. The priority number lets the system know the order of your commission groups if you want your affiliates to move through them based on performance. Based on the affiliate's status in a group, you can set the affiliate as "ascending" (which won't let him fall to a lower priority commission group) or to "descending" (which won't let him move to a higher priority commission group).
Click the Save button to save your new commission group. You can then click the Back to campaign button above to return to editing the campaign..
Now we have created a new commission group called VIP members, but it does not have any special commission settings, nor affiliates added.
You can see that this group doesn't have any commissions defined yet. Now click on the Edit button in the per Sale commission type.
There you can specify per sale commissions for this group. Standard commission in this campaign is 30%, so we'll set VIP affiliates' commissions to 40%.
Click Save and Close to get back to the commission group screen.
Now the per sale commissions for VIP affiliates group is set to 40%. The last thing we need to do is to add some affiliates to this group.
Adding affiliate to group
Switch to the Affiliates in group tab, and you'll see that there are no affiliates in this group yet.
You can add affiliates to this group by clicking on Add affiliate button, and selecting an affiliate from the drop down box. You can also set their status as "ascending" or "descending". (More info available in the articles below)
Now all your affiliates in the commission group will get that commission (40% in our example), while the rest of affiliates will get the default commission (30% in our example).
Note: In close cooperation cooperation with the commission groups feature, there's also a feature called performance rewards. Check out these related articles to see how to combine these features:
How to disable performance rewards for selected affiliates