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Ask Shawn Collins: Paying Deferred Commissions to Affiliates

March 14, 2006 by Shawn Collins

I have a potential merchant with a travel site – they want to utilize cost per sale campaign with me but they don’t want to pay our affiliates per booking (they call it creative revenue) – they only want to pay when the visitor uses the booking (they call departed revenue). I am happy to try and set this up using our affiliate tracking software, but could you suggest how I could pay our affiliates monthly, as some of their bookings can last anywhere from 2 weeks to 12 months before they use their bookings.

This is actually quite common for affiliate programs in the travel and hospitality businesses. I’ve frequently heard the term, consumed bookings, with regards to paying affiliates when a flight, cruise, hotel room stay, etc. has taken place.

So affiliates that are already running these sorts of offers will not be surprised by the commissions being in limbo until the booking has been consumed.

As far as setting up the affiliate reporting when a commission has been confirmed to them, there are a couple ways to go about it.

You could have all transactions set as pending and then confirm them as the travel takes place. Of course, this can be a bit time consuming as the affiliate program scales up.

Alternately, you could upload a file daily with each instance of “departed revenue.” Then the affiliate tracking solution would have to run a process to match up the pending orders with the confirmed orders.

I’d urge you to contact the tech support folks to see what sort of process they can work out for you.

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