E-junkie Issue or problem with Paying Affiliates Properly

[dreamec]

Hello e-junkie,



When we click e-Junkie > MANAGE AFFILIATES > PAY YOUR AFFILIATES



It only shows:



"Click here to download the PayPal Mass Payment file for November 2011."



So the fisrt issue is that we need to select a date range from July - Today or somehow see all payments due up to the current day.



Then when following your instructions that say "To make a mass payment, log in to your PayPal account and click "Mass Pay" at the bottom of the page."



There is no MASS PAYMENT OPTION where your instructions say.



However, if I click around Paypal to SEND MONEY > MAKE A MASS PAYMENT, I see the possibility, but I get another error:



"We're sorry, but your PayPal account isn't currently eligible to send mass payments. Please contact either PayPal Customer Service or your account manager."



We are using Paypal Website Pro so I'm not sure if the instructions are outdated or not applicable, but we need to know:

1) How to get the full affiliate payments due to date

2) How to make a mass payment



Thanks in advance!

[E-junkie_Monster]

Hello,



Unfortunately there's been a change at PayPal recently regarding their mass payment feature. They are restricting it to high traffic accounts ... or accounts with Website Payments Pro. Since you have that service already you should be eligible for the masspay service but you will need to contact PayPal to get it set up.



The report we generate is only for the previous calendar month. If you wish to use it we recommend running it between the 7th and 10th of the month to account for any last minute refunds or reversals.



Affiliate earnings for previous months (or any other time frame) can be viewed in your transaction log, see our help page here:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/trouble.affiliates.history.htm

[dreamec]

Hmmm, for us most of our affiliates it take at least 3 months to generate sufficient funds to reach a reasonable payout threshold. From what I've read it's even more for the average Amazon affiliate.



Since e-junkie only generates affiliate revenue for a the last previous month, that's really not going to be of any use for us for some time. Is one month of use to most or a minority?



1) Have you done any research to see what the average affiliate payout each month is to see if just 30 days makes sense?

2) I mean, do most e-junkie customers have to run a manual report do to this limitation? 3) Will you ever have a report that span 3 months?

4) What are the excel steps to sort, subtotal, and export to just the necessary payment info? When I imported to excel, Microsoft Excel had difficulty subtotaling the transaction log.

5) Do I need to track payouts somehow with e-junkie if I do a manual report and mass payment?

6) What if a client wants a payment by check - does that impact affiliate payments tracking? The reason I ask is because when we signed up for affiliate program I remember it said something about ensuring payments to affiliates.



I hope these questions and feedback help you because I'd like to stick with e-junkie through growing pains.



Paypal turned on masspay for me - thanks for the link!

[E-junkie_Guru]

You can still generate the monthly masspay files without uploading them to PayPal right away, so e.g. you could hang onto them and then just combine 3 of them into a single file to make quarterly payments. However, if your affiliates aren't earning enough to make monthly payouts (once you give it enough time to get that ball rolling), you might evaluate whether running an affiliate program is even producing enough benefit for you and affiliates to be worth the bother.



Most affiliates in our system expect to receive the standard monthly pay-outs typical of most affiliate systems that don't do instant per-sale payouts, so you should be extremely clear on your site's affiliate recruitment page that you only pay out commissions quarterly rather than monthly, and enter the URL of that page in your Seller Admin > Affiliate Program Settings > More Information URL, so affiliates can find it easily.



Generally speaking, to sort rows by a column in a spreadsheet program, you would select all the cells or columns you want to sort, then look for a Sort command that lets you pick which column(s) the selected cells should be sorted by, where you would pick the Affiliate ID column in this case. From there, you may be able to simply select the range of Affiliate Share earnings for each affiliate, which may show you an instant sum in one of the program's toolbars. We can't really provide more specific instructions for any particular software program; even for Excel, it varies depending on which version you have, and I don't even have Excel myself (I use the free Gnumeric program instead).



If you pay out commissions to any affiliate(s) by a method other than PayPal, you can edit your masspay file(s) to remove that affiliate's commission before you upload it to PayPal. We don't have any way of tracking your pay-outs to affiliates; that is entirely your own responsibility. In fact, you can disregard the IPN instructions in our Affiliate Program Settings screen, as those were intended to inform us when you pay out commissions but didn't work out as planned, so we're removing those instructions from the next version of Seller Admin.