The beauty of the Affiliate and Referral add-on is in its flexibility and simplicity. When your customer registers, they are suggested to become either a customer or an affiliate.
Both of them can get a reward for promoting your store—but what exactly is the difference?
Let’s break this down!

Commissions

Both customers and affiliates can get a reward for:

Sales
New customers
New affiliates
New vendors (if you are a marketplace owner)

Additionally, affiliates can get paid for:

Placing banners on their websites
Banner clicks
Commissions of their affiliates
Coupon promotion.

Your customers can go further and become a pro affiliate whenever they want. The only thing they need to do is to click the Become a pro affiliate button and get your approval.

Affiliate Pro Perks

Incentive balance

Professional affiliates may have an initial balance. For example, you offer a blogger USD 100 of incentive balance for placing your banner in their blog. If someone clicks that banner and purchases something in your store, the blogger additionally gets a 5% commission.

Multi-tier affiliation

Professional affiliates can get a commission from the purchases made from referral links of the affiliates they engaged.
For instance, your affiliate John invites his friends Jacob, Matthew and Sarah to become your affiliates. When a customer purchases products in your store from the referral links of Jacob, Matthew or Sarah, John also gets a commission. When Jacob, Matthew and Sarah involve new affiliates, John gets his commission again from the purchases made from the referral links of the affiliates invited by them. Thus, we have a pyramid where John is on the top, Jacob, Matthew and Sarah are on the second level, their affiliates are on the third level and so on. The higher an affiliate is, the bigger their profit is.

Category and product promotion

You can choose which products and categories your affiliates are allowed to promote. For example, a famous beauty blogger promotes your cosmetics and a popular stylist promotes your accessoires.

Coupons

You can engage your affiliate in the promotion with coupons. For example, you create a BlackFriday coupon with a discount. Next, you create a commission from sales for the affiliates who share this coupon with your potential customers. The coupon appears in the My account area of your affiliate where it looks like 3-BlackFriday. The number 3 here is the ID of your affiliate. When a customer purchases something in your store and applies the 3-Black_Friday coupon, your affiliate gets the commission.

Widget mode

Your affiliates can place a widget with your store on their website. The only thing you have to do is to select the “Show to affiliates” setting in the Widget mode layout. It will appear in the My account area and they will be able to embed it on their website.

To sum it up, here is a comparison chart:

	Affiliate Pro	Customer
Payout sales commission	yes (cash)	yes (points)
New customer commission	yes	yes
New affiliate commission	yes	yes
New vendor commission	yes	yes
Show banner commission	yes	no
Click commission	yes	no
Coupon commission	yes	no
Category promotion	yes	no
Product promotion	yes	no
Multi-tier affiliation	yes	no
Incentive balance	yes	no
Widget mode	yes	no

Study more about Affiliate and Referral add-on on web site.

Customer vs Affiliate Pro