new We just released a much requested feature by many of our customers regarding fraud detection.

Refund and chargeback fraud happens when affiliates sign up fake customers with stolen or virtual cards, wait for you to pay them then the bank or themselves ask for a refund, remaining with the paid commissions.

This new feature helps detecting much easier this type of fraud by showing you the affiliates that have a high refund rate. The refund rate threshold is set at a conservative default of 25%, calculated by the number of refunded customers and total customers. This will spot affiliates that have at least 1 refunded customer for every 4 customers they referred.

You should adjust the threshold based on your own billing behavior. For ex. if you're doing initial charges to validate a credit card, FirstPromoter will track the refunds that happens in the process so your perceived refund rate will be higher.

Suspicious affiliates will appear on Promoters section on Suspicious tab. The data is refreshed every 20 minutes so the first time you enable it please wait 20 minutes to fill up.

Note that if an affiliate is suspicious, doesn't necessary mean they're a fraudster, you still need to verify their account first and check what referrals they made.

By the way, if you're wondering why our updates pace is a bit slow, that's because we're focusing a big part of our resources on the new UI of FirstPromoter which will be finished very soon.

First of all we want to wish you a Happy New Year, full of success and prosperity. 

The new year brings some new features and improvements to FirstPromoter:

new Added 3 new direct integrations on our personalized integration wizard:
Kajabi, ThriveCart and SamCart

new You can now disable access to the promoter dashboard until the promoter selects a payout method. 

This is hugely helpful and will be enabled by default for the new FirstPromoter customers. Many times payouts were not generated and our users couldn't pay the affiliates because they haven't added a payout method. 

You can enable it from Campaigns > Configure promoter dashboard > Don't allow access to the dashboard until a payout method is selected. 
Make sure you hit Save after that :)

improvement Better reports CSV export. Before this, if you wanted to download a Promoters or Campaigns report in CSV format, it asked you to select a single data point (column) for downloading. Now you can select any data point available. More info here.

improvement We're showing now the connected Stripe account ID on Stripe integration page (Settings > View integrations > Stripe). This should help our users to figure out faster what accounts have connected with FirstPromoter.

In Stripe the account id can be found on Stripe > Settings > Account details (inside Business settings category) > Top right corner.

fix fixed some validation error for International Bank account payout method

fix fixed SMTP connection issues for a small number of edge cases

fix fixed some URL validation issues for Multiple referral links feature

Other changes:

• we won't support non-monetary rewards (credits, free months, points, etc) for Starter and Business plans anymore, only Enterprise ones. Old accounts are not affected, this is applied only for new accounts starting from January 1st, 2022.
• renamed "New website" option to "New sub-account"
• better clarified when to use sub-accounts or add new links to existing campaigns in case of different domains. More info here.

new The original super admin of an account can create / set other super admins.

improvement If you're embedding our affiliate dashboard and auto log in promoters into the dashboard, you can pass the user sign in IP to improve fraud detection.  

improvement Super admins can now delete or reset campaigns without contacting us, but they first need to remove all promoters from the campaign. Note that both reset and campaign deletion option removes the data permanently and we can't restore it.

improvement The note of custom rewards created manually is shown now on the Rewards section. If you hover the cursor over the note icon it will show the note content.

improvement you can now search by lead/customer "uid" in Rewards section, not just email

fix  we updated the direct url tracking script shown on the UI when you enable direct url tracking. New customers had some issues with that script, but now it's solved.

fix fixed website url field validation on promoters signup page

fix when resetting or deleting campaigns, could happen that the balance for promoters on those campaigns to not be cleared completely. This is fixed now.

fix when deleting a campaign some promoters may look like they disappeared.  They are now shown in Promoters > Others tab.

new This month we added the option to use Wise.com as a payout method. You'll need a Wise business account and your affiliates any type of Wise accounts. You'll be able to pay to their email address like Paypal does. In both cases the account is free and transfer fees are sometimes cheaper than Paypal.

new There's a new way to move customers from one affiliate to the other. This option won't move the existing commissions to the other affiliate, just new commissions that will be earned by the customer will be assigned to the new affiliate. To use this feature, check "Do not moved earned commission" box on the edit customer form when you want to move a customer under another affiliate.

improvement added the country column on the Pending and Rejected promoters tab

improvement promoter answer for the approval page question is show directly on the Pending promoters tab by hovering over a purple icon near promoter's name.

improvement  added visitor source (from what website the visitor came from) on Customers export file

improvement added social handles on promoters export file

new we added a small icon to identify rewards that are added manually. If you hover over it you'll see the team member that created the reward. 

improvement if a reward was denied or approved manually, you can see the date when the manual state change was applied by hovering the mouse over the reward icon:

improvement we added a cancelled customer webhook. It's disabled by default but it can be enabled by request. It works for affiliate postbacks/webhooks as well.

new added cancelled_at field on customers export CSV file

improvement when affiliates change their referral id from their dashboard it will show a more aggressive warning that old links need to be updated otherwise they won't work

fix issue with deleting campaigns earlier than 45 days is fixed

fix sign out error when trial expired is fixed

fix error when going to Quick Setup without creating a campaign is fixed

Even though our users are delighted about our reports feature, one of the best out of all affiliate tracking tools, the one thing they missed was viewing total numbers for the entire date range, not just grouped by period.

We listened and just added that feature today. The totals will also be available to be downloaded as CSV or JSON:

new active_customers_count column also added on promotions export

improvement showing the time when referral became customer, not just the date, on Customers section

fix new accounts without any campaign created won't get an error when trying to get to integration wizard

fix exporting large number of promotions will also be made via email, like promoters export

fix fixed the sign out error when trial expired or users got locked into the billing section

fix VAT validation for UK companies it's now fixed.

fix Companies that have a large number of promoters won't get an error when trying to export the promoters. The export will be processed in the background and when it's finished, they will get an email with a temporary download link.

fix the cache of the email counter caused some issues for some new accounts, showing a wrong count in the "Sent" column. We identified the problem and fixed it.

new Last week we launched a wizard that helps new users integrate FirstPromoter much easier with their websites. It has a simple step by step approach with new pre-made scripts and more examples for custom integrations that require a developer. 

Only users that signed up for a trial after 31st March 2021 have access to it. If you're an older user and want to try it out, please contact us.

new It's now possible to use Stripe's customer facing promotion codes for affiliate tracking. Until last week, you could only use the Stripe Coupon Code ID for tracking, which is different than the promotion codes. If you already use coupon code tracking you don't have to change anything in your setup.

Now you'll see another field below the "Tracking coupon code" field, where you can enter the Promotion Code. Since promotion codes are a subset of coupons in Stripe, you'll still need to enter the Stripe Coupon id on "Tracking coupon code" field as before.

new active_customers_count field on API responses and webhooks payload. It represents the paying(non-cancelled) customers. Very helpful on adjusting commission for custom referral programs dependent on the active number of customers a promoter has.

new created_at parameter for cancellation and refund tracking API calls

new added "Blocked" tab on promoters page to see promoters that were banned/blocked 

improvement faster API loading times for accounts with a big amount of data

improvement direct url tracking now works even if you forgot to add "www" in front of the url inserted on "Landing page url" field while the actual page loads with "www".

fix fixed the error on hosted affiliate terms preview

Due to the recent changes on Apple iOS 14, iPhone and iPad users that are using Safari may encounter tracking issues with the current ClickFunnels script. 

For most of our ClickFunnels customers this subset of users is very small so it may not affect your affiliate program performance by much, but it's still recommended to replace your old checkout / optin script with this new one for better accuracy. 

Note that only the script on the checkout page must be updated, not the visitor - global tracking script. If you need help with the update please contact us via live-chat.

This is the new script:

<script>
 function set_fprom(){
    $(document).on('mousedown touchstart','a[href="#submit-form"],a[href="#submit-form-2step"],img[imagelink="#submit-form"]', function(){
      $FPROM.trackSignup({
            email: $('input[name="email"].elInput').val(),
            event_id: new Date().valueOf().toString()
      },
      function(){})
    });
 }

if (window.attachEvent){
  window.attachEvent('onload', set_fprom);
}else{
  window.addEventListener('load', set_fprom, false);
}
</script>

We're happy to announce that Ghost.org Team integrated FirstPromoter with their awesome publishing platform. The integration is so easy that you just need to copy some id from our Settings page and paste it into their FirstPromoter integration page.

You can find more details about it here. Kym from Ghost also wrote a great piece about referral programs for newsletter businesses that you can check out.