Recurring
A recurring commission follows a subscription for as long as it renews, not just the first payment. Cap it at a number of renewals, or leave it open. Recurring is what makes a subscription business worth promoting: an affiliate who is paid once on a £9 signup has no reason to send you their best traffic.
Lifetime
A lifetime commission pays the affiliate for everything a referred customer ever buys, on any product, forever. It relies on customer binding, so the customer is tied to the affiliate rather than to the cookie.
It is the most generous setting in the plugin and the one to model before enabling. A customer with a decade of orders is a decade of commission.
Tiered
Tiers raise the rate as an affiliate crosses thresholds you set — by referral count, by revenue, or by earnings. Two decisions matter more than the numbers:
- The window. Lifetime totals or a rolling period? Lifetime tiers never go down, which is simpler to explain and more expensive over time.
- Retroactivity. Does crossing a tier reprice the referrals that got them there, or only what follows? The plugin does the latter by default, which is the cheaper and the more common reading.
MLM structures
Pro adds multi-level commissions with Unilevel, Binary and Forced Matrix topologies, so an affiliate earns a smaller percentage on the referrals of people they recruited. Check your jurisdiction before you build one — the legal line between multi-level marketing and something regulated is not drawn by your plugin settings.