At the moment affiliate payment are entered as a monthly payment against commission earned for that month. There is no record of when the payments were made, how they were made or if it was done in multiple payments. There is currently no easy way to see if commission are owed without going back and looking at each month.

So I propose the following ideas:
* add a payment method to the paid table
* use the date in the paid table as the actual date the payment was entered in the site
* the reports should show a summarized view of the commission earned and payments paid out during the month (there is no reason these need to add up), probably also another column for outstanding balance.
* replace the paid form on the manage/reports with a "enter payment" form, this would would include a drop-down for the payment method as well as the current amount. The
* on the users commission page I would prefer to see a summary of commissions earned along with payments, what I am looking for is something similar to how report are shown on the clickbank site.
* there would also be a place (like a statement) to drill down into each commission and payments with options for admins to edit/delete any of these amounts.

These are just some general ideas / goals I have, I can't promise I will have any of this done straight away, but just posting to see if anyone has any other thoughts on this?

Comments

bojanz’s picture

bojanz commented

Sounds good.
I was thinking earlier if this is a task this module should be doing at all, but it seems we have no other alternative.

dabblela’s picture

dabblela commented

Wondering if there's been any progress on this? I like all of the above, I think a nice addition mighht be allowing a user to select their preferred method of payment and then some additional details depending on the method chosen - address if they choose check, e-mail address if they choose PayPal.

From there, since I'd think the majority of people would be using PayPal, it'd be nice to generate a csv for use with PayPal's mass payment service (a POST mass payment solution would require significant work on the uc_paypal module).

I'd like to contribute some time on this, but I'd love to hear some feedback from you guys, do you think this should be added to the $user object or set in a new affiliate2 table? I think I'd like to see the latter, and to add new affiliates to this table with hook_user.

Doomd’s picture

Doomd commented

I would like to 3rd the motion. These sound like great features and alot of people would appreciate them.

univate’s picture

univate commented

This was mostly a proposal and putting ideas down in writing, I am flat out with other projects at the moment so can't promise much energy into these features. But I am interested in other ideas/thought related to this.

@manatwo - I don't think we can start attempting to pay commissions until there is a good record of what is owed and what has been paid. But I agree having a field that users can select how they wish to be paid is a worthwhile feature - this really needs a pluggable system where anyone any add other payment options, similar to how you can add other payment gateways to ubercart.

I have also created a patch in the issue queue that adds views support to this module, which will already allow you to create a csv version of some of the commission data already output by this module.

that0n3guy’s picture

that0n3guy commented

Not sure if this should go in a new issue or not, but seems to go hand-in-hand with affiliate payment handling so...

It would be nice to be able to subtrack out the "refunds" of the next pay period if the affiliate was paid before the refund was requested.

example:
pay period 1 - joe and jim buy using Bob's affiliate link. There is a 30 day refund policy but affiliates are paid every 2 weeks. Bob is paid at day 14 for both joe and jim's purchaces.

payperiod 2 - Marry and Jessica buy using Bobs affiliate link at day 16. Joe asks for a refund at day 19. Bob is paid at day 29 for marry and jessica's purchases MINUS joes return (from last pay period).

benhelps’s picture

benhelps commented

As part of a project I'm working on for a client at the moment I commissioned a developer to make a Paypal mass commission payment module for me. It's finished and being tested at the moment. I'll check on it's ownership too see if I can donate it on here ( or maybe the developer would like to maintain it).

rlnorthcutt’s picture

rlnorthcutt
he/him
commented

Any word on this?

benhelps’s picture

benhelps commented

@rlnorthcutt no idea about the original thing, but I'm in the process of getting the affiliate2 Paypal masspay module onto cvs.