A referral arrives unpaid and pending your approval, or auto-approved if you configured it that way. Approving it makes it payable; rejecting it does not.
The states
- Pending — recorded, not yet payable.
- Unpaid — approved and waiting for a payout batch.
- Paid — settled in a batch.
- Rejected — kept for the record, never payable.
Rejected referrals are not deleted. An affiliate asking why they were not paid deserves an answer, and a deleted row cannot give one.
Safeguards that ship free
- Self-referral blocking — an affiliate cannot buy through their own link or coupon.
- One commission per order — no double-crediting, whichever routes matched.
- Hold for review — commissions above a threshold you set wait for a human.
- Duplicate order guard — the same order cannot produce two referrals, however many times its status changes.
Refunds
A refunded order reverses its commission automatically. If the affiliate has already been paid, the amount is clawed back against their next payout rather than silently written off — and the clawback is visible in their portal, so it is not a surprise when the next payment is short.
Auto-approval
Auto-approving suits a programme with few affiliates you already trust. It suits a public programme much less: fraud safeguards catch the mechanical cases, not the affiliate who has quietly built a coupon-code site around your brand.