Affiliate Referrals let your affiliates recruit other affiliates and earn a share of their sales, from a single referral hop (Tier 2) up to a deep, multi-level (MLM) downline. This guide covers how to enable it for your partners, how the model works, and how to track it.
Requesting Referrals and Providing Your Contracts
To get started, let the Inflektion team know you’d like to enable Affiliate Referrals for your program, and provide the commission contract for each tier / level you want to offer.
- For a simple Tier 2 program, provide one referral rate and its basis (payout or gross sales).
- For a multi-level program, provide the rate for each level you want to reward (for example, a 10%/5%/2% three-level structure).
The team sets these up as named Referral Contracts you can then assign to any partner.
Enabling Referrals per Partner
Once your contracts are in place, you enable referrals on each partner individually:
Go to Partners and open the partner’s detail page.
Scroll to the Partner Referrals section and check Enable Partner Referrals.
Under Referral Contract, select the contract for the tier / level structure you want this partner on.
Click the save icon next to the dropdown to apply it.
Referral Metrics: Once enabled, the same section shows this partner’s referral Conversions, Earnings, and Average for the selected date range, so you can see how their downline is performing at a glance.
Fixing a Missing “Referred By”
When an affiliate signs up through a recruiter’s referral link, the parent-child relationship is created automatically. If someone signed up without using the link, their Referred By will show None – and this is now an editable field admins can correct directly, no ticket required.
On the partner’s detail page, find Referred By and click the edit (pencil) icon.
In the Change Referrer window, open the Referrer dropdown and select the correct parent affiliate.
Save. The affiliate is now attributed to that referrer, and future commissions flow up the chain correctly.
How It Works
The Simple Case: Tier 2
The most common setup is a single referral hop, called Tier 2. When one of your affiliates recruits another affiliate, the recruiter earns a referral commission on the sales the new affiliate generates.
There are two ways the Tier-2 commission can be calculated, defined in the referral contract you provide:
- Affiliate payout basis – the recruiter earns a percentage of the referred affiliate’s commission. Example: a recruiter set to 15% of payout earns $15 when their referral earns $100 in commission.
- Gross sales basis – the recruiter earns a percentage of the referred affiliate’s total sales. Example: a recruiter set to 5% of gross sales earns $5 on every $100 the referral sells.
The Deep Case: Multi-Level (MLM)
The same mechanic can extend beyond a single hop into a full multi-level structure, up to 6 levels deep. Each affiliate earns on their own sales, and each recruiter above them earns an override on the sales flowing up from their downline.
A recruiting affiliate earns their own standard commission on their own sales. On top of that, they earn a referral override on every sale made by the partners in their downline, at each level below them. Here is a neutral illustration of how those overrides can be structured. Actual levels and rates are set by the contracts you provide:
| Level | Who made the sale | What the recruiting affiliate earns |
| Level 1 | The recruiting affiliate’s own sale | Their standard payout rate (not a referral override) |
| Level 2 | A partner they referred | 10% override on that sale |
| Level 3 | A partner referred by their Level 2 | 5% override on that sale |
| Levels 4–6 | Each partner further down the same chain | 2% override on that sale each |
Worked example: Bob refers Chris, Chris refers Dana, and Dana refers Priya. When Priya sells a $200 order, Priya earns her own standard commission (Level 1). Dana, who referred Priya, earns a 10% override ($20). Chris, one level up, earns 5% ($10). Bob, another level up, earns 2% ($4). All of these overrides are calculated automatically from that single sale, and each recruiting affiliate earns down their own chain.
Tracking Referrals: The Partner Referrals Page
Open Partner Referrals from the left-hand menu to see the full referral network as an expandable tree. Use the date range and search at the top to filter.
- Each top-level row is a referring affiliate.
- Expanding a row (the − / + toggle) reveals the affiliates they recruited, shown as tier-tagged sub-rows (Tier 2, Tier 3, Tier 4, and so on down the chain).
- The Payout column shows the commission attributed at each level, so you can see exactly how earnings flow up through the structure.
The same affiliate can appear at different tiers under different parents. Expanding another top-level partner shows their own downline and the tiers within it:
Tip: A partner showing $0.00 simply has no attributed referral payout in the selected date range – either no downline activity yet, or no referrals beneath them.
Payment
Tier 2 and MLM commissions are tracked automatically and paid out during your regular affiliate pay cycles. No additional steps are required once referrals are enabled and contracts are assigned.