Affiliate tiers that can go down

Affiliate tiers at Paymos are read off a number rather than awarded once. Three of the four rates — 20%, 25%, and 30% of the Paymos processing fee referred merchants generate — follow how many of those merchants are active.

Active means two things at once: a merchant that is not suspended, blocked, or rejected, and a qualifying production payment it settled in the last 30 days. That window rolls, the rate is re-derived from it daily, and a drop applies exactly as a rise does.

The partner program page carries the ladder, the rates, and a calculator. What follows is the layer under them: how a merchant enters and leaves the active count, what the daily pass touches when it fires, where the money is carved from, and which rate no count reaches.

What does a tier table leave out?

A tier table shows named levels, a threshold beside each one, and a single implied direction of travel. It is a picture of an outcome. The rule that produced the levels is what decides whether a level holds, and the picture does not contain that rule.

Three questions sit underneath any such table. What counts toward a threshold — a signup, an approved account, or a customer that pays? Over what period is it counted, a lifetime or a window? And once a level is reached, is the count ever read again?

Those three answers decide what the ladder is worth. A lifetime count of signups and a rolling count of paying merchants agree in month one and diverge permanently afterwards. The rest of this article answers all three for the Paymos program, starting with the one that does the most work.

What counts as an active merchant?

An active merchant is one that is not suspended, blocked, or rejected, and that settled at least one qualifying production payment within the last 30 days. Both conditions have to hold at the same time, and both are read as of today.

The 30 days roll. No lifetime tally sits behind the tier, so a merchant referred in January and settling last week counts today, while a merchant referred in January whose last payment was in June does not.

Signing up is not the qualifying event; settling is. A merchant that registers, integrates, tests, and never takes a live payment adds nothing to the count, because the count never reads the registration. The tier moves on merchants that trade, not on merchants that joined.

What does the account-status condition rule out?

The status condition rules out three account states: suspended, blocked, and rejected. A merchant in any of them sits outside the count whatever it settled recently. The test is a current one rather than a history: what the account is today is what the count reads.

The two conditions are joined, not alternatives. A merchant in good standing that has settled nothing for 31 days fails the payment condition. A merchant that settled yesterday from a suspended account fails the status condition. Neither one rescues the other.

This is why the count moves without the portfolio changing. Nothing was referred and nothing was lost — an account state changed, or a date passed, and the number the rate is read from is a different number this morning.

Which payments qualify?

Two settlement events qualify: a paid invoice, or a confirmed deposit on a payment channel. Either renews that merchant's 30 days in the count, and the count does not care which of the two produced the money.

The two are different products. An invoice is created per order, with an amount and an expiry — how one moves from created to paid is its own guide — while a payment channel is a standing deposit identity that carries no amount and no expiry at all. A merchant that only ever uses channels is as active as one that only ever issues invoices.

Production is part of the definition. Sandbox runs on separate credentials against a virtual balance, so a simulated deposit is not a settlement and never reaches the count — a merchant testing an integration for a month is not an active merchant.

Why is the rate recalculated every day?

The rate is recalculated daily because the number it reads moves on its own. A rolling window changes with no party acting: a merchant's last payment ages past the thirtieth day and the count falls by one, with nothing cancelled and no decision taken anywhere.

A number that moves by itself has to be re-read on a schedule, and that schedule is daily. The pass reads the current count and assigns the rate it produces. It applies a downgrade on the same pass, by the same rule, as an upgrade.

Nothing marks a tier as reached and therefore held. The one exception is the Strategic rate, granted on request rather than derived from a count, so the daily pass has nothing to re-read and leaves it where it is.

What does a tier change touch?

A tier change touches the whole portfolio, in either direction. The rate is a property of the partner rather than of an individual referral, so two rates never run side by side — one for merchants introduced before a change, another for those introduced after.

Two thresholds sit behind the derived rates: 20% runs from day one with nothing to cross, 25% from five active merchants, 30% from twenty. Crossing 5 active merchants reprices the first four along with the fifth. The single rate that covers everything on the way up covers everything on the way down, so a portfolio falling back under a threshold is repriced whole rather than partly.

Upgrades are automatic, and the same daily pass that reads the count applies a change in either direction. One rule, one schedule, and the same threshold read the same way whether the count is rising or falling.

Which tier can no count reach?

The 40% rate is the one no count reaches. It is the Strategic tier, and no threshold sits behind it — not a high one, not a hidden one. It is granted on request, by a person, and no number of referred merchants produces it.

This changes how the tier table reads as a plan. Three of the four rows are arithmetic: count the active merchants, find the row, that is the rate this morning. The fourth row is a conversation, and treating it as the top step of the same staircase produces a target with no route attached to it.

It is also the one rate the daily recalculation skips. The derived tiers are recomputed each day from a number that can fall; a granted rate is not read from anything, so there is nothing to re-read.

Where does the commission come from?

The commission comes out of the Paymos processing fee rather than out of an addition to it. The share is a percentage of a fee that already exists on that invoice, so a referred merchant pays what the price list says: 1.0% per settled invoice on Standard pricing, or 0.3% on Enterprise pricing, on request.

Which line the percentage reads is the distinction worth holding onto. A partner share is a share of the fee, never a share of the volume that produced it, and at Standard pricing those two readings of the same percentage differ by a factor of a hundred.

Neither number is capped: no ceiling on the volume a portfolio can carry, and none on total commission earned. That fee line is one row in a larger cost model, and what a payment costs end to end sets out the rest.

When does the share arrive?

The share is credited when a referred merchant settles an invoice, at the moment it settles. There is no monthly close to wait for and no payout schedule; the credit lands on the settlement itself rather than on a date somewhere after it.

The two tests behind the program are not the same width, and the difference is easy to miss. The active count accepts either qualifying settlement, a paid invoice or a confirmed payment-channel deposit. The share is stated against invoices: it is paid on every invoice a referred merchant settles.

That makes a paid invoice the event doing both jobs at once. It renews that merchant's 30 days in the count, and it credits the share. The count and the credit are two separate readings, and the invoice is what satisfies both of them.

Which number should a partner watch?

The number to watch is merchants that settled something in the last 30 days. Total merchants introduced is a historical figure the tier never reads, and the two numbers stop agreeing the first time a merchant goes quiet.

At identical annual volume, a portfolio of small, regular merchants holds a higher rate for more of the year than a portfolio of larger, seasonal ones. Twelve merchants trading every month keep a count of twelve; thirty that trade in two bursts a year read as thirty twice and as zero the rest of the time.

Seasonality is therefore a rate question and not only a revenue one. A portfolio that empties out between peaks reads as a smaller portfolio in those months, and the rate follows it down and then back up.

What is one more active merchant worth?

Between thresholds, one more active merchant is worth its own commission. At a threshold it is worth that plus a raise across everything already there — because a tier change reprices the whole portfolio, the fifth active merchant lifts the rate on the other four as well.

The same holds at the twentieth. What one more merchant is worth depends on where the count sits that day, not on its own volume alone. That is the part of the program worth planning around.

It also puts maintenance beside acquisition. A merchant that goes quiet for a month leaves the count as surely as one that never launched, so bringing an existing merchant back to steady trading is worth as much as introducing a new one — more, when the count sits on a threshold.

Your referral link and the rate currently in force are both in the dashboard. Every credit on it starts with one invoice reaching its final paid state, and the path a crypto payment takes to get there does not change because a partner introduced the merchant.