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Adding, editing and deleting referrals
On This Page
A referral is one record of an affiliate having sent you a sale: who referred it, what it was worth, and whether they have been paid for it. Referrals are normally created automatically when somebody buys through an affiliate’s link. This page is about the times you need to create, correct or remove one by hand, and about the one field that decides whether anybody gets paid.
Most of the time you should not be editing referrals at all. The system records them correctly on its own. Manual edits exist for the exceptions: an order that came in by phone, a commission agreed at a different rate, a refunded sale. If you find yourself editing them routinely, something upstream is wrong and we should look at it rather than you keeping up by hand.
Where they are
In your dashboard, go to Affiliates, then Referrals. Every referral the site has recorded is listed with its affiliate, amount, description, date and status.
Status is the field that matters
Everything else on a referral is bookkeeping. Status decides whether it counts and whether it gets paid.
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Pending | Recorded but not yet confirmed, usually because the order has not completed. It will move on by itself. |
| Unpaid | Confirmed and owed. This is the one that turns into money at your next payout run. |
| Paid | Already settled. Treat as a historical record. |
| Rejected | Not eligible: a refund, a cancelled order, a duplicate, or a breach of your terms. Kept for the record but never paid. |
Reject, do not delete. Deleting a referral erases the evidence that it ever existed, which makes an affiliate’s own dashboard disagree with yours and leaves you with nothing to point at when they query it. Rejecting keeps the record, explains itself, and does not pay out. The only referrals worth deleting are genuine test entries you created yourself.
Adding one by hand
The realistic reasons: a sale that came in by phone or invoice rather than through the website, a commission agreed outside the normal rate, or a goodwill payment.
- On the Referrals page, choose Add New.
- Start typing the affiliate’s name or email and pick them from the list.
- Set the amount, in your store’s currency.
- Write a description that will still make sense to somebody else in a year. “Phone order, invoice 2041, agreed 15%” is a good description. “Manual” is not.
- Fill in Reference with the order number if there is one. This is what makes your store and your affiliate records reconcilable later, and it is the field most often left blank.
- Set the status deliberately. See the table above.
Editing one
Click the referral to open it. Amount, description, reference and status are all editable.
- Correcting an amount before payout is routine. Do it, and note why in the description.
- Editing a referral already marked Paid changes your records but not the money that left your account. If a paid referral was wrong, the cleaner fix is usually a compensating adjustment rather than rewriting history.
- Changing status to Unpaid means it will be included in the next payout. Be sure that is what you want.
Refunds
When a customer is refunded, the referral for that order should end up Rejected. Depending on how your store is set up this may happen automatically. It is worth spot-checking after any refund, because paying commission on a refunded sale is the most common way an affiliate programme quietly loses money.
Finding a particular one
The Referrals page has a search box and filters for affiliate, status and date range. Searching by order number or customer email is usually faster than scrolling, especially once you have thousands of records.
When to email us instead
- Commission rates, tiers or the payout schedule. Those are settings, not referrals, and changing them affects everything going forward.
- An affiliate saying their dashboard does not match yours.
- Anything involving a payout that has already gone out.
- Bulk changes. If the answer involves editing more than about ten referrals by hand, stop and ask; we can do it as one operation and it will be correct.
For the click-by-click detail of every field, AffiliateWP maintain their own documentation, which is always more current than ours.
What we need if something fails
The referral’s reference or order number, the affiliate, and what you expected to happen. If money is involved, tell us before making a second change rather than after.
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