If you use PayPal Mass Payment (our recommended payout method), the payment sender (merchant in this case) pays a fee on top of the actual payment amounts they're sending, rather than having the fee taken out of each payment, so the payment recipients (affiliates in this case) receive their payment in full. The fee to send a Mass Payment is also less than the usual transaction fee to send each of those payments individually.
If you send commission payments individually, PayPal deducts their fee from the payment amount sent, so the affiliate would receive less than the full payment amount you send. In this case, you may wish to compensate for that deduction by adding the transaction fee to the total payment amount you're sending. To calculate this, divide each commission amount by 0.971 and then add 30 cents -- e.g., if the commission amount is 10.00, then (10.00 / 0.971) + 0.30 = 10.60, so that's the payment amount you'd send.
