Our team quite often receives questions regarding our payment terms and overall payment process. For your convenience, we have put together this blog post which contains the most frequently asked questions affiliates have regarding their payments.

1. What are the payment terms?

In short, payments are made once per month, on the 15th of each month (or the next working day, if the 15th is not a working day). To be more specific though, we need to go through the entire payment cycle, explained below.

As you already know, affiliates earn a commission for every validated action (lead or sale) they generate for the advertisers they promote. This means that in order for a sale or lead to be paid, first it needs to be validated by the advertiser. As soon as an action is validated, it gets a “status date”, i.e. the date on which it was validated.

At the end of each month, Linkwise gathers all actions that were validated within that month based on their status date, sums up the respective commissions and calculates the amount that has to be invoiced to the advertiser. Therefore, this amount does not include commission for all actions generated within that month, only actions that were validated within that month.

At the beginning of each month, Linkwise looks at each affiliate’s commissions that have already been invoiced to advertisers based on the above process and marks the ones that have been paid to the network by the advertiser. If these commissions exceed the minimum payment threshold of 20€ for an affiliate, Linkwise notifies the affiliate that a payment has been generated for them (this usually happens on the 5th of the month). If the affiliate accepts the payment, the payment is then made on the 15th of the month (or the next working day, if the 15th is not a working day).

For example:
An affiliate generates X sales for a program within July and these sales are validated by the advertiser on August 20th. At the end of August, Linkwise calculates the total commission from sales validated by the advertiser within August and invoices the advertiser accordingly. If the advertiser pays this invoice by the end of September (and the affiliate’s commissions are above 20€), a payment is issued on October 5th and (if the affiliate accepts it) the payment is made on October 15th.

In some cases, a program might be on pre-payment terms (meaning the advertiser has pre-paid for commissions). In that case, the affiliate will be paid on September 15th, just 15 days after the end of the month in which sales were validated.

2. How long will it take to get paid for the sales/leads I generated?

Taking into account the network’s payment process (explained in the answer of the previous question), it becomes clear that affiliates might get paid within 15 days after the end of the month in which sales were validated (as long as the advertiser has pre-paid for commissions). In most cases though, advertisers are on 30 day payment terms, which means that affiliates are paid 45 days after the end of the month in which sales were validated.

Right now, there are no programs live on the network on payment terms longer than 60 days. Therefore, affiliates should expect to be paid all commissions within 75 days at the latest.

Our aim is to be as transparent as possible regarding payment times. On the affiliate interface you can find the “Commission status” report (in the Statistics section) which allows you to see -at any given moment- which of your validated commissions have been paid by the advertisers and when, as well as when these commissions will be paid to you.

3. Is there a minimum payment threshold?

Yes, there is a minimum payment threshold of 20€. This means that affiliates will get paid only after they have accrued a minimum of 20€ in a given month. If your commission is less than 20€, it will be transferred to the next payment.

4. Are there any requirements from the affiliates’ side in order for them to be paid?

There are no requirements as far as issuing a payment is concerned. As long as you meet the payment criteria described above (“What are the payment terms?”), Linkwise will issue your payment automatically and notify you to log in to the affiliate interface and accept it, after you carefully go through your payment details and fill in any missing information (e.g. IBAN, Swift code, etc).

All affiliates that are based outside of Greece will need to send a tax residency certificate to their affiliate manager in order for them to be able to accept their payments. Affiliates can ask their affiliate manager to provide them with the template of the document, which they need to take to their local tax authorities to fill in.

The reason we require this document is in order to “activate” the double taxation treaty (if present) between Greece and your country so that your commission only gets taxed in your country and not in Greece too. This is required for both individuals and companies.

Additionally, if you are a company, you also need to sign a self-billing agreement before you can accept your payment, which you can ask your affiliate manager to send over (more information under the question “What is self-billing?”).

5. Do I need to issue an invoice in order to get paid?

No, you will not need to issue an invoice in order to receive your payment.

If you are a company (or individual service provider, a type of company in some countries), Linkwise will issue an invoice on your behalf (following the self-billing process described below) in order to pay you, which you can download from the affiliate interface.

If you are an individual, Linkwise will issue a document similar to a self-billing invoice (called “title of acquisition of services”) in order to pay you, which you can also download from the affiliate interface.

6. What is self-billing?

Self-billing is a process when the receiver/customer of a service issues the invoice for this service on behalf of the supplier of the service. Therefore, instead of the supplier issuing the invoice in order to be paid by the customer, it is the customer who issues the invoice (called a self-billing invoice) on the supplier’s behalf and pays the supplier.

Linkwise follows the self-billing process for paying all affiliates. Therefore, affiliates do not need to issue an invoice, since Linkwise will issue a self-billing invoice on their behalf.

7. What are the methods of payment?

Payments towards both individuals and companies can be made via:

1) Bank/wire transfer: Linkwise does not charge for this type of transaction; however a fee might be applied by your bank.

2) PayPal: There is no fee for PayPal transfers to an individual’s account. Fees may be applied for transfers to company accounts.

8. What is PayPal?

PayPal is an “e-bank”, where you can create an account in order to deposit money, receive/make payments or transfer money to your “real” bank account. Linkwise uses PayPal for affiliate payments, as one of the easiest and most efficient ways to transfer money.

9. What happens when an advertiser does not pay?

As per their contract with the network, all advertisers are obliged to pay their invoices on time, so affiliates will also be paid on time by the network (usually affiliates are paid within 45 days after the end of the month when their sales/leads were validated). If an advertiser does not pay their invoice within the agreed timeframe, Linkwise will investigate the problem and use all means necessary in order to secure payment, including legal action. In this case, affiliates will be paid once the invoice is paid by the advertiser.

Although many times in the past Linkwise has covered affiliate payments using its own funds (and sometimes still does) in cases when advertisers had either delayed payments or never made them, this cannot be the rule. Linkwise reserves the right to not pay affiliates for commissions that have not been paid by the advertiser. This happens for two reasons:

a) Depending on the amount of money Linkwise will have to pay on behalf of an advertiser that didn’t pay their invoice, a temporary or permanent cash flow problem could be caused, with unforeseen consequences regarding affiliate payments. Consequences could vary from short-term delays to an overall freeze of all payments; therefore the entire payment process would be in jeopardy and not just payments regarding commissions for the program in question.

b) Linkwise, like any affiliate network, provides a technology platform which advertisers use to host their affiliate programs and track corresponding sales. This does not in any way transfer the responsibility of payments from advertisers (who are the ones receiving the sales and therefore the monetary benefits of this activity) to the platform they selected to track these sales.

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