Paying Affiliates
Paying on time is the quiet thing that keeps affiliates loyal. The short answer: review and approve sales on a fixed rhythm tied to your refund window, pay on a predictable schedule with a small minimum threshold, and record every payout the moment you send it so your balances stay honest. This article explains how to build that discipline, then links the Bloop tools that support it.
Partners promote stores that pay reliably and drop the ones that make them chase commissions. In Bloop the mechanics are deliberately simple: you only ever pay against approved sales, so a payout is just turning a balance you already owe into a recorded payment. Bloop never moves money itself — the reliability comes from your process.
Approve before you pay
Every affiliate-driven order starts as a claim, not a payment. The gap between the two is your chance to catch cancelled orders, returns, and fraud before money leaves your account.
Review sales on a rhythm aligned with your refund window — approving weekly, after the typical return period, means you rarely pay on an order that later comes back.
Skim for anything unusual, like a sudden spike from one affiliate or oddly large baskets, before bulk-approving the rest.
Reject cancelled or returned orders promptly so balances stay accurate.
Do this in the Sales review tab.
Set a schedule and a threshold, then keep them
Reliability beats generosity here. A fixed cadence tells affiliates exactly when to expect payment and keeps your accounting tidy.
Cadence
A fixed interval — for example monthly, once sales have cleared their review period
Predictability is what keeps affiliates loyal
Minimum threshold
A small minimum balance before you pay out
Avoids the overhead of tiny transfers
Timing vs refunds
Pay after the refund window has passed
Stops you clawing back commission on returned orders
Publish your schedule and threshold to affiliates up front so there are no surprises.
Record every payout immediately
Bloop's payouts area has two views: Approved, each affiliate's outstanding balance (what you currently owe), and Paid, a record of everything you have completed. The Approved view is only trustworthy if you record payouts the moment you send them — otherwise it overstates what you owe and you risk paying twice. Make recording the payout the last step of every payment, not a later cleanup task.
Keep clean records for accounting
Export your payout history regularly so your bookkeeping matches what affiliates received. Clean records also make it easy to answer a partner's "have I been paid?" question without digging, which reinforces the reliability that keeps them promoting.
Set it up in Bloop
Approve sales in Affiliate sales review.
Pay and record in Affiliate payouts.
Set the commission those payouts draw on in Best practices: a commission structure that scales.
Related
Last updated