Partner Commissions

Hi Landon,

Thanks for your comment. I realize I may have misused this space—I intended to share feedback directly with Ontraport.

That said, I wanted to raise a point about how commissions are currently handled. We encourage our partners to actively share their unique promo links with their communities so that when someone purchases through that link, the partner earns a commission.

However, right now, if a contact has a first or last referrer on their account and purchases a commissionable item, the partner still receives a commission—even if they didn’t actively promote or engage at that point. They simply brought the contact in initially.

I understand this is managed through pending commissions, but I think it would be helpful if we had the option to turn off this automatic commission feature. That way, we could better incentivize ongoing partner engagement rather than passive commissions.

To address this, we spoke with Ontraport support via chat and they provided us with a solution. We’re going to implement an automation that removes the first and last referrers from a customer’s account, so no automatic commissions are made. We just wanted to put in a request that this automatic commissions feature be made optional (and maybe I'm referring to it incorrectly, but this is how we understand it at the moment), or if there’s a better way to manage this, we’d love to know. My team is also meeting with Ontraport support soon for more training.

Thanks again for your response.

Gotcha. 

Sounds like you are using this in a slightly less-common way (short term promotions, no long term credit for leads) which is totally fine, but we probably won't change how to platform works to accommodate it as everyone is used to, and most people appreciate, the current situation. 

In your case, I'd simply wipe referrers using an automation or, just before a promotion, using a group action... just wipe 'em all.

As for keeping that data you like (who initially referred them?) I would simply make a different field for that and update it automatically. 

1. Create a new relationship between contacts and contacts called 'original referrer'. 
2. Create an automation that updates 'original referrer' to the value of 'first referrer' when first referrer is updated the first time. You'll need to use a webhook and the API for that, but it's super simple, set up once and never think about it again.
3. Set up an automation to wipe last referrer after X days or whatever you think.

An alternative to the above would be to simply not show your partners their pending commissions, which is very easy to do if you're using Dynamic CMS and an Ontraport membership site for your partner portal...