Affiliate fraud is real and one of the ugly parts of affiliate marketing. FirstPromoter already has built-in protection against fraud, like generating rewards only when the sale is confirmed on the billing provider, automatic refund tracking or self-referral detection.

However, some companies, because of their industry and type of affiliates that register on their program, have to deal with multiple fraud attempts. To help them out more, we launched 2 new features to increase protection against chargeback fraud and self-referrals. The new features can be found under Settings > Fraud protection tab.

new Require a minimum number of paying customers to generate the payout

This feature almost completely avoids self-referral fraud, where an affiliate signs up from their own referral link to get a commission from their own purchase. The affiliate will need to subscribe at least one other user (or higher, depends on the number you set) to get paid. The users must not be cancelled, they need to be active, paying customers for the payout to be generated.

This also helps around other types of fraud because it becomes harder for the fraudster to create multiple accounts and keep them subscribed.

new Require manual approval for commissions above an amount

On most cases of chargeback fraud, where the affiliate asks for a chargeback after a while or uses stolen credit cards and the bank issues a chargeback, the fraudster subscribes to the high tier/annual plans or makes expensive purchases to receive high commissions. With this feature, you can keep higher commissions as pending until you verify if the customer is a real user (ex. has activity inside your application, has a real email, etc).

Even with these features enabled, the best measure is to manually review and verify each affiliate when they sign up to your program. If some bad actors slip in, you'll have another round of defense against them.

improvement We now support multiple webhook URLs per campaign. This feature lets you handle multiple Zapier triggers or advanced webhooks integrations. You can add up to 3 webhook URLs per campaign.

new We released two new API endpoints to help you manage and automate custom payouts. 

You can now list all your payouts and also change their status to something else - for ex. you can mark the payout as paid (completed status) after your payout provider finishes the payout. More details here.

new There's a new API endpoint to list available commissions/rewards of a promotion, promoter, campaign or the entire account. More info here.

Some other changes:

new you can switch between Stripe test and live mode from Getting Started > Quick setup section (while you are disconnected). You can also see in what mode you're currently connected on.

new added sub-id field on affiliate dashboard rewards export file

new added W8-BEN and W9 download urls on Promoters API response objects

improvement api/v1/leads/list API call is 3 times faster

fix some CSS layout issues on smaller screens

fix W8-BEN/W9 form is also shown in the preview from Campaigns > Configure promoter dashboard if it's activated. Before that, the form was hidden on preview mode.

We're proudly announcing our advanced reporting feature for FirstPromoter. After months of hard work we managed to finish it and now it's available to everyone.

We think it's one of the most complete reporting features out of all affiliate tracking tools on the market right now.

This feature gives an in-depth view of the performance of your affiliates and the program overall across 17 data points grouped by different periods. You can also download the data as both CSV and JSON format.

To get access to the new feature, click on the "Reports" section on the left side-bar.

To learn more about this feature, click here.

improvement We replaced "Signups" field with "Referrals". In most cases referrals are the same as signups, just that they include customers coming from coupon code tracking... basically any person referred by an affiliate (doesn't matter if it converted to customer or not) is a referral.

 improvement We replaced "Cancellations" field with "Cancelled customers". Cancelled customers shows only active customers that cancelled which is more accurate and useful. The old "Cancellations" field showed all cancellation events we recorded, including cancelled free trials or multiple cancellations for the same customer.

improvement You can also see now that the dashboard chart loads so much faster. For companies with a lot of data, even 20x times faster.

We released an option to enable Stripe Test mode integration for users that want to test more their setup before going live.

Even though it's not required and you can easily test with a single live transaction, some users have more complex integrations using webhooks or API that requires multiple Stripe charges being made.

Note that it doesn't work for the same account, to have 2 stripe integrations, one live and one in test mode. You need to either disconnect the live one to connect the test one (careful here because live tracking will stop working) OR have a Business or Enterprise plans that gives you a second free account which you can use for testing.

To enable test mode go to Settings (button on top-right) > Integrations tab > View integrations > Stripe > Switch to "Enable test mode" > Save then click "Connect". If you don't see the switch it means you are already connected to Stripe and you need to disconnect it first.

new We just released a feature that allows you to manage much better your affiliate agreements like affiliate terms and conditions. You can now:

• host affiliate terms & conditions inside FirstPromoter
• ask affiliates to re-agree if the agreement content is modified
• ask affiliates added by API or Zapier to agree to the agreement
• have a clear view of whom, when and what (we store each agreement version)  was agreed to for each affiliate. A must have in case of audits or legal issues.
• assign an agreement to multiple campaigns
• assign an agreement to specific affiliates in case you set up custom terms for them

Current users that have affiliate terms and conditions set in the old way are not affected by this change, but we still recommend to add their agreements again using the new feature. The previous feature didn't have a way to record the agreement version and the date when the affiliate agreed.

When you add or update an agreement for an existing campaign with affiliates, it won't send emails, it will just ask the affiliate when they log in back to review the new agreement and check the "I agree" checkbox before giving access to the dashboard.

To learn more about this feature, click here.

We have some new features for you.

new Campaign duplication
Very useful when you want to create a copy of another campaign with the same configuration, dashboard settings and email content. You can duplicate a campaign by going to Campaigns > open the campaign menu > Advanced > Duplicate campaign.

improvement Leads page on affiliate dashboard is called now "Referrals"
"Leads" name was quite confusing for affiliates, especially since that section shows both customers and leads (non-converted users). 

new Masking email option for "Referrals" (former "Leads" page) section
Many companies kept the "Leads" page hidden because it exposed the user emails. That page shows helpful information to the affiliate about the referral status and when they converted. We think companies should be able to make this section visible to everyone without being concerned about privacy.

If your Leads page is already visible and you want to mask the emails, go to Campaigns > Configure promoter dashboard > check "Mask referrals emails" and Save.

new  Search field for referrals page on the affiliate dashboard
We got many requests from those of you running partners programs where partners are highly involved in the sale process to add a search box in the former "Leads" page. We just added it - your partners need to click the "search" link. Note: this feature is available only for campaigns where email masking is disabled.

We added a few little features to FirstPromoter that will help some of you quite a bit:

new We added Address and EU VAT id field on the affiliate signup form. The VAT ID field verifies the VAT using VIES. This is the first public step towards automated invoice generation for EU customers. Since you have these fields on the CSV export and the API, you can set something up to automate invoice generation right now.

new You can move/switch a customer or lead from a promoter to another promoter. Normally this should happen rarely, but when it happens you can use this feature to move all commissions and events of a customer or lead to another promoter. Edit the lead/customer and click "Show advanced options"

new  Remove self-referral mark from customers that were marked as suspicious because the affiliate used his/her own referral link to sign them up. This happens often for consultants that sign up clients using their own referral link and don't have yet the lead form enabled.

new Affiliate address it's added now on Bank payouts export. Transferwise and some banks require for some countries to fill the address of the receiver.

Now you can set up more advanced rewards like "First 3 months 40% then 20% recurring commissions" or "First 12 months $100 then $50 each month".

Before that, you could set up a different commission only for the first charge, now you can set for first x charges a different commission than the remaining ones.

When you create a new reward, click on "Show recurring commission options" to be able to set up the commission the first charges.

This weekend we launched tax form collection feature for our US customers. As a US company, you'll be able to ask your affiliates to upload the W-9 or W-8BEN tax forms. 

This feature is not enabled by default, you need to enable it from Settings page (click the top-right button) > Others tab.

Once enabled, affiliates will have on their dashboard, right above the referral link, a section asking to upload those documents, like in the image below:

Both title and description can be modified from Campaigns > campaign menu > Configure promoter dashboard > W-9/W-8BEN upload section.

Link to uploaded documents are available on the promoter page (after clicking the promoter name) on 'View more details' link on top-right panel. They are also available when you export the promoters by CSV.

Promoters that don't have the documents uploaded will have a small warning icon next to their name on Payouts section so you can avoid paying them (if that's required), like in the image below:

If you want to speed up the process for current affiliates, we recommend to send them an email to let them know they can upload the documents on their dashboard.

We're happy to announce that we released one of the most requested feature - to pay affiliates directly from FirstPromoter dashboard. You don't have to log in to Paypal, upload CSV files or mark payouts as completed, it's all automated !

Once you finish the integration with Paypal Payouts, you'll be able to pay your affiliates automatically after clicking the 'Pay now' button on Payouts section. Click here for more details.