The Payment & Confirmation Process

This article explains the payment and payment confirmation lifecycle.

If you haven’t already, we recommend reading the Admin Area and Payments UI articles prior to reading this article as it assumes a basic understanding of both.

As discussed in the Admin Area article, there are multiple ways to initiate the Payments User Interface including individual and bulk actions on affiliates and referrals.

Once a payment is processed (sent to the blockchain), an AffiliateWP Payout is generated for the affiliate. This payout and all associated referrals now have the ‘Sent’ status. This new status (introduced by the plugin) represents the intermediate state between when a blockchain payment is processed and when it is confirmed (minimum number of confirmations).

You’ll see below 2 payments with ‘Sent’ and 2 with ‘Paid’ statuses. The 2 marked as ‘Sent’ are new (and successful) transactions that have not been confirmed yet.

The plugin automatically checks (using WP Cron) all transactions and only marks the Payouts and associated Referrals as ‘Paid’ based on the following:

If a transaction had had more than 100 confirmation attempts and is older than 72 hours (3 days), the associated AffiliateWP payout is marked as ‘Failed’ and the associated referrals are reverted to the ‘Unpaid’ status.