Awarding affiliate commission for purchases in different currencies

[Karl]

My Objective: To sell a product from my site in different currencies.

For those prices to be represented as fixed prices, not based on the exchange rate of one ‘master’ price that I set. E.g. USD 19.99 and EUR 14.99, not EUR 15.70 or whatever the exact conversion of 19.99 USD is at that time)

For this to work with WP Affiliate, in so far as awarding commission to the referring affiliate despite the fact that the purchase is not always in the same currency.

So far my idea is this (i own WP Affiliate Plugin and WP Simple Paypal Shopping Cart but I will be buying WP eStore for the below solution). I will use just US and UK to keep it simple:

1. Incoming customer arrives at [www.example.com]. I will use a geolocation plugin to redirect to [www.example.com/uk] if he is from UK. Otherwise, he will remain on [www.example.com].

2.a) On [www.example.com] by ‘Buy Now’ button will be set to add a 19.99 USD amount to the cart. When they click ‘Buy Now’, they will be taken to [www.example.com/cart] and can checkout from there.

2.b) The UK customer has been redirected to [www.example.com/uk] and the ‘Buy Now’ buttons on there will all be set to assign a GBP amount to the cart. Said cart will be displayed on [www.example.com/uk/cart]. The reason to not use the same cart page is because beneath the cart I will be putting buttons to add more quantity of this product (double and quadruple pack, for example), and those buttons will need to be different on each cart page so that they add the current currency.

Since all visitors will arrive at [www.example.com] initially, the site will set the cookie for the affiliate plugin to track them (I assume it will have time to do this?).

But when they checkout and pay, what will happen with regards to the fact that my affiliate plugin is set to $ and yet some of the purchases are in £.

A few potentials things could be (and I don’t know if these are possible):

Having the £ version assign a different % which I will contrive such that the resulting commission is correct being viewed in DOLLARS.

Something to do with the Thankyou/return page…. (if that’s how WP Aff Plugin works…?)

Something more complicated?

Something involving completely separate domains yet still tracking the cookie for the same affiliate?

Quick example of what I mean is this:

A referred customer (from US) buys a $25 product and the commission is set to 10% so the affiliate gets $2.50 added to his commission account.

Now another referred customer (from UK) buys the same product at £15 and the commission of 10% is now £1.50 but due to the affiliate plugin being set to $ then it will just add $1.50.

Conundrum!

Any help is appreciated.

[wzp]

What if they visit your site, using TOR, or some other proxy server?

[admin]

Hi, The affiliate plugin can’t handle multiple different currencies in the same store like you suggested unfortunately.

[Karl]

Wzp,

There will also be the manual option for them to change the site to the geographically relevant site if they inadvertently spoof the plugin.

Admin,

Ok thanks.

I have thought of an alternative solution. It’s not perfect but it should work. Please let me know what you think:

Since my product is just a single product (with only a few pack-size variations) I will change the commission from a percentage to a fixed amount (let’s say 5 USD).

That way, if they buy the item for £15 then the affiliate gets 5 dollars commission and if they buy the $25 variant then the affiliate still gets just 5 dollars commission.

Am i correct in thinking that the commission will only be assigned once per basket? (if they add one 2-pack and one single-pack will it give 5 dollars commission per basket item or 5 dollars per basket checked out?)

Am i correct in thinking I can use the same cart (i.e. installed on the same domain) to have both £ and $ items added? (by configuring the buy now button)

Thanks.

[admin]

The commission is given for each item unless you specify that a particular product shouldn’t generate any commission. Yes, when you specify a fixed commission amount, it will only give that much commission regardless of how much the item was after variation changes.

So if there are 2 different items in the cart, it will generate a total $10 commission ($5 + $5).

The same cart plugin will be able to handle the different currency transaction. You just can’t mix currency in ONE checkout instance.

[Karl]

I believe I have come up with the best solution for this problem now and wanted to add it below:

If you just put $5 fixed commission into the WP Affiliate Plugin, then now the problem is that the commission is awarded for every cart ITEM not per cart.

(Apparently) eStore allows different product-specific commissions to be set. This overrides whatever fixed commission rate you may have entered into the WP Affiliate Plugin. So now all I need to do is to assign a proportional fixed commission per item. That way, if they add 1 cheap product and 1 expensive product, it won’t give (5+5) 10. It would give e.g. (2.5 + 5) 7.5

Thus giving a quasi-% based commission BUT being compatible with using many different currencies, as explained above (since the commission is not calculated as a % of the item price anymore).

[Author]

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