Item Based Commission (IBC) allows merchants to provide commission rates by product instead of offering one general commission rate. This may be to offer extra incentive for certain items, or to reduce standard commission rate due to low margin products. This article will review;
HOW TO IMPLEMENT ITEM BASED COMMISSIONS
The following steps will ensure that your program’s IBC is set up properly.
- Contact the AvantLink Support team (support@avantlink.com) to ensure that your program is set up to handle Item Based Commission. Once our team has confirmed set up, implementation requires the following steps:
- Have a functioning datafeed in place.
- Update your product datafeed file to include an "Item Based Commission" column. It is easiest to include the column to the far right of the datafeed for mapping purposes. Populate this field for all products that will not be receiving the base commission using the decimal form of the percentage. (ie. 9% = .09). If the value is empty it will default to the standard commission rate.
- Ensure that any items you do not wish to commission, for example gift cards, are set to .00000001% (or 0.000000001) in the IBC column.
- Once the datafeed is updated, contact the AvantLink Support team (support@avantLink.com) so they ensure the datafeed is mapped correctly.
IBC ITEMS TO REMEMBER
Items with an IBC value are updated with each datafeed import. Commission rate changes will be effective after each import. By default, datafeeds are updated every 24 hours.
Sales commissions are calculated on an item-by-item basis, instead of the Order Subtotal (the final amount before shipping, taxes, etc.) amount passed to us. This method is used whether or not IBC items are included on any specific order.
The merchant must be fully integrated. IBC will only go into effect when a product SKU is both passed to AvantLink via the tracking pixel and is found on the datafeed. Otherwise, the base commission will be used. Products SKUs passed to AvantLink in the order script must match the SKU that is in the provided datafeed.
IBC can be utilized to set an item(s) commission to zero. If you wish to stop a specific item from commissioning, simply set the commission for the item to .00000001% (or 0.000000001). While this will still commission the item, it will do so at a minuscule amount that our system won't recognize.
ENSURE YOUR IBC IS WORKING CORRECTLY
To ensure that your IBC is properly working, you can initiate a sales tracking test. See: Integration Testing for specific instructions on how to create a test tracking link and what information to look for in the sales confirmation page.
ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS?
Item Based Commission can help implement different commission payouts for your products. If you have any questions about this article or the steps discussed, please email support@avantlink.com.