Some merchants want to prevent affiliates from earning commission if the referring affiliate himself/herself is the purchaser.
Most affiliate programs do not really care about this since purchase is a purchase and it is still referred by the affiliate even if it was done by the affiliate himself. If you still don't want to give such commissions you can use the plugin called "Prohibit Commission If Affiliate Is Purchaser" which allows you to set a custom commission (e.g. $0) that an affiliate should obtain if he/she himself/herself is the purchaser of the commission.
The plugin checks whether the customer's email address sent in the sale tracking request matches the username of the referring affiliate. This means that the plugin will not affect the commission if an affiliate makes a purchase but the commission is tracked under some other affiliate. The plugin will affect it only if the same affiliate who should get the commission also did the purchase. Also if the email address used during the order is different than what affiliate uses as his username then this plugin will not kick in.
To activate the plugin go to the merchant panel Configuration->Plugins where you click "Activate" next to the "Prohibit Commission If Affiliate Is Purchaser" plugin.
- Custom Commission defines the commission value (numbers only) which should be given to the affiliate if he is the purchaser. If you define 0 then the commission will not be saved at all by default, but if you want it saved you need to go to Campaigns->Campaigns manager where you'll edit your campaigns and then under Commission Settings you'd edit per Sale commission type and check the "Save transaction with zero commission"
- Transaction data field listbox defines the Data X field into which your sale tracking integration passes the customer's email address. Most of the integration methods pass it to Data 1, but if you are not sure here then consult the integration guide for your shop or contact our support
- Notification e-mail address lets you define an email address to which notification will be sent when this plugin affects a commission
- Skip affiliate checkbox allows you to do not save the commission to referring affiliate at all and instead move it to his parent affiliate
- Select note field defines the extra data field in commission into which the below Note text will be saved, select one which you do not use for anything else
- Note adds a note to the saved commissions affected by this plugin, it will be visible to your affiliates AND mainly it is used to prevent other features from changing commissions affected by this plugin, like for example Performance Rewards feature could recalculate already saved commissions. Having something in the note field will prevent it from doing so
Tips and use cases
1. As explained this plugin would affect the commission only if the order done by affiliate should also be assigned to this affiliate. So sometimes people also want to ensure that all the orders done with affiliate's username/email will go to this affiliate, to achieve it you would need to use the Lifetime Commissions plugin and its option to "Tie new affiliate with himself".
2. You don't want to give commission to the affiliate for his own orders but you want them added to some performance rule which you have set up using the Performance Rewards feature. In this case you'd set the Custom Commission field to 0 and you'd enable saving of zero commissions as explained under the Custom Commission explanation.