I've told you before to stop paying flat rates and tier your commissions by role.
What I never did was show you the actual tiers.
So here is the part I owe you: the five tiers I actually run on a live program, the number attached to each one, and the reason a single flat rate quietly bleeds your margin while training less incremental partners to stick around.
Why one rate is a trap
Most small programs pay everyone the same. One CPA, every partner, no matter what they did to earn it.
It feels fair. It is the opposite of fair.
A flat commission structure pays the creator who introduced a brand-new customer exactly what it pays the cashback site that popped up two seconds before a checkout that was already going to happen.
(We don’t work with cashback extensions, it is just to give you an example)
Same payout, wildly different value. You are overpaying the partner who added the least and underpaying the one who actually grew you.
Do that long enough and the math gets ugly. Your easy, low-effort, last-click partners look like your best performers on the dashboard, so you feed them more. Your real introducers earn the same as the closers, get financially bored, and drift off. You end up with a roster optimised for the wrong thing.
The fix is to pay for the work, not the timing.
The five tiers I run
Here is a structure I use on a live program. New customers only, 30-day cookie, five flat tiers:
Closed communities: €5. Private deal groups, student and staff perks, members-only spaces. The low commission works because what these partners actually want is a great deal for their users, not the CPA. Give them that and they convert hard and stay genuinely incremental. The real cost to watch here is your margin on the deal, not the €5.
Cashback: €5. Real reach, real audiences, but often last-click on demand that was already moving. Baseline rate. (more on this in the next edition)
Base: €20. Your standard content and niche partners.
VIP: €28. Proven introducers. Partners who consistently bring new customers in at the top of the journey and convert them.
VIP+: €33. Your best. The handful who drive discovery and volume, the ones you would notice immediately if they stopped.
What you are actually paying for
Read the tiers again and notice what climbs the ladder. It is not loyalty. It is not how long someone has been a partner. It is not how loud they are in your inbox.
It is incrementality. The further up the ladder, the more confident I am that the partner created a sale that would not have happened otherwise. The baseline tiers start low because, most of the time, they are closing demand that was already moving.
Match the payout to the value created, and three things happen. Your introducers finally earn more than your closers. Your closers lose the incentive to leapfrog, because there is no fat last-click payout to steal. And your spend quietly reallocates toward the partners growing the business.
Before you go park everyone at the bottom
One warning, because this is exactly where people get it wrong.
A baseline rate is not a verdict. A €5 cashback partner is not a cheap partner, and the floor is not where you abandon them. It is where the relationship starts.
What you build on top of that baseline is the difference between a program that just sorts partners and one that actually grows them. That is the whole next email, and it is the part most managers never do.
This week, try this:
List every active partner and write one word next to each: introducer, closer, or assist. Go on gut first, then check it against your conversion-path report.
Group them into three buckets to start: floor (last-click, low incrementality), base (honest mid-funnel), top (proven introducers).
Set a real spread. If your floor and your top are within a few euros of each other, you do not have tiers, you have a flat rate with extra steps.
Email your top two partners and tell them they have been moved up. Watch what a partner does when they find out you actually noticed.
Next edition: why the €5 partners are where the long game is really won if you play it right.
Talk soon,
Jani Gysels
Missed a past edition? Read the full Affiliate Snacks archive here: https://affiliate-snacks.beehiiv.com/archive