What commission should I offer?

What is actually adjustable

The Affiliate program section of Settings holds four fields, and systeme.io calls all four essential to complete. Two of them are percentages.

What each one does

Default commission is the share of a sale an affiliate keeps. systeme.io's own worked example: a product at $22.50 before VAT, with a 40% commission, pays the affiliate $9.00 per sale.

Minimum payout amount holds a commission back until it is worth invoicing. Set at $50.00, an affiliate needs $50.00 or more pending before an invoice is generated for them.

Second-tier commission pays an affiliate a further percentage when the affiliates they referred make sales. systeme.io's worked example runs the whole chain. Affiliate A sends a customer to an $80.83 offer at 40%, so A earns $32.33. That customer then becomes Affiliate B and sells the same offer, earning $32.33 of their own. Because A recruited B, A also takes the 5% second tier on B's sale, which is $4.40.

Default payout delay is how long a sale waits before it can be paid out.

The number is not a product setting

systeme.io ships the field holding 40%. It publishes no guidance on what a programme of yours ought to pay, because that is a pricing decision about your own margins rather than a switch in the software.

Three documented facts bear on it.

• It is a percentage of the sale. Both commission fields are expressed in percent, so the payout scales with the price.
• It is per order form. A new order form starts at 0%, and the rate is set on the order form settings, so two products can pay two different rates.
• It repeats. Affiliation is lifetime. A referred contact who buys again months later earns that affiliate a commission again.

What the payout delay is for

systeme.io states the reason plainly: the delay avoids paying commission on an offer that has a money-back guarantee. It recommends checking the setting against your own terms and conditions.

A 30-day guarantee sitting behind a 7-day payout delay means paying commission on sales that can still be refunded.

Which settings you cannot vary per product

The minimum payout amount and the second-tier percentage apply immediately across all your order forms. Only the commission percentage and the payment timeframe can be changed on an individual order form page.

That change is made inside the funnel, in the order form configuration, and it saves itself rather than waiting for a Save button.

Those four fields are the whole of what systeme.io documents about setting commission levels.