Multi-level Marketing

1. What is Multi-level Marketing?

Multi-level Marketing (MLM), also known as network marketing or referral marketing, is a promising strategy to sell products and services by encouraging existing employees or affiliates to recruit new affiliates. As a result, your business could reach out to more potential clients via a variety of channels and advertising campaigns.

MLM Model

The fundamental of Multi-level Marketing is represented by a pyramid, in which each affiliate asks another affiliate to join his or her affiliate network system as a downline level. The more people who are invited, the more products or services will be able to reach out to their target market.

The affiliate in the pyramid network is not only paid for the sales he/she generates, but also for a share of the sales revenue made by their downline affiliates - which is called network commission. Therefore, people in the MLM network would be incentivized to recruit more affiliates under them instead of just directly selling products to customers.

The network commission that upline affiliates receive will be provided separately, not deducted from the commission of the downline affiliate.

2. How to set up

To set up MLM, you must first click the Activate MLM checkbox.

Network commission can be based on total sale or program commission, and set at a percentage or flat rate.

The maximum of MLM levels is 20.

The commission value should be set in descending order to make sure that the affiliate who directly brought the order will receive the most commission amount. Take a look at the Live example to check if you set up everything correctly!

You can also configure advanced settings like recruitment bonus to your affiliates when they successfully recruit other affiliates, or the minimum total revenue an affiliate must reach to be able to receive network commission. Or select a program for the invited affiliates to join if you don't want them to start at the same level as the upline affiliate.

For example, the MLM recruitment bonus is $5 and the minimum total revenue is $30. Affiliate A recruited affiliate B and received a $5 bonus. When affiliate B brings back an order, affiliate A has only generated $25 of personal sales and is not eligible to receive network commission for that order although being affiliate B's parent affiliate.

Once you are done with the settings, remember to click Save!

3. How affiliates recruit others

After MLM is activated, there will be a network link in each affiliate's dashboard.

Affiliates will share their dedicated network links to recruit others to join your program. When they click a network link and sign up as new affiliates, they will be considered as downline affiliates of a lower level than the link owner.

Plus, downline affiliates' performances can be viewed in both the merchant's and the upline affiliates' dashboards.

4. Set a parent for an existing affiliate

If you want to set upline affiliates for an existing affiliate, go to Affiliates > click the affiliate's name > Network > Set Parent.

Here, you can fill in the parent affiliate's name or email to search. When you finish, click Save.

There can only be one upline affiliate for each affiliate. Additionally, you can't make a current downline affiliate to be an upline.

5. How MLM commission is displayed

If an order is brought by an affiliate in the MLM network, the order commission for the downline as well as the network commission for the upline will be shown in Conversions.

Affiliates can also keep track of their network commission in the Network tab.