A group is a cohort of affiliates that shares a commission rate. It exists so you are not editing forty affiliates to change one number.
Creating one#
Squad Affiliate → Groups → Add New. Give it a name and a rate — either a percentage or a flat amount, the same two rate types an individual affiliate or a commission rule can carry — then assign affiliates from the group screen or from each affiliate’s own record. A group with no rate at all is a valid group: it’s just an organisational label at that point, and members fall through to the programme default like any ungrouped affiliate.
Where a group rate actually sits#
A group is not one of the things a commission rule can be scoped to — there’s no “group” entry in the rule engine’s list of scopes (product, campaign, category, performance tier, role, site-wide). Instead, a group rate lives one level down, in the plain fallback chain that produces a rate before any rule gets a chance to override it:
an affiliate’s own rate, if they have one, beats their group’s rate — which beats the programme default.
That fallback is then checked against commission rules exactly the way an ungrouped affiliate’s rate would be, and a matching rule — even a low-priority, site-wide one — replaces it outright. So a group rate is not “one tier down from a product rule”; it’s not compared against rules at all. It only ever competes with an affiliate’s own rate and the programme default, and it loses that competition to the affiliate’s own rate whenever one is set. See Setting commission rates for the full two-stage resolution.
What groups are good for#
- A launch cohort you promised a better rate to, without that promise living in your inbox.
- Regional partners on a different rate for a defensible reason.
- A probation group on a lower rate until an affiliate has proved out.
What they are not#
Groups are not tiers. A tier moves an affiliate automatically on performance, based on their lifetime referral count or lifetime earnings crossing a threshold; a group is a deliberate assignment you make, and nothing about an affiliate’s activity moves them in or out of one on its own. Using groups as manual tiers works right up until you have thirty affiliates and no memory of why anyone is where they are — at which point performance-tier commission rules were the answer. See Recurring, lifetime and tiered commissions for how those work.
Managing a group list#
Groups are searched and sorted the same way any admin table in the plugin is — by name, by rate, or by creation date — and the whole group table is held in one cache entry rather than queried per row, since a programme typically has a handful of groups, not hundreds. Deleting a group does not delete its members; it just leaves them without a group rate, falling back to the programme default the next time a referral is resolved for them.
Ranks and retainers#
Pro adds ranks, which are automatic and performance-driven, and retainers, which pay a fixed amount per period regardless of sales. Both sit on top of groups rather than replacing them — a rank or a retainer is another layer an affiliate can carry alongside whichever group they’re in, not a reason to stop using groups for the cohort organisation they’re good at.