AFFILIATE FAQs

Affiliate marketing is an online marketing strategy based on the following principle: We (International Cosmetic), an e-commerce company, and an affiliate who agrees to promote our products or services in exchange for a commission on any resulting sales.

An affiliate normally has a blog or content page that is growing in traffic and visits and wants to take advantage of it to earn money. They want to monetize their page or blog. The trust they inspire in both users and the company they affiliate with is essential, as is the selection of products and the business relationships they establish from the date they join the affiliate program.

The affiliate makes their website, advertising space, and the reach and traffic of their site available, directing it to International Cosmetic.

• Profitable: International Cosmetic only pays the affiliate if the customer makes a product purchase. In other words, the affiliate brings a potential customer to our website, and if that customer ends up making a purchase, both we and the affiliate earn.
• Simple analytics: Affiliate programs can be easily tracked through statistics and data used to create metrics, comparisons, and studies.
• Steady stream of income: Even when you are not at your computer, because it is work that depends on traffic, redirects, and online purchases, you can earn money at any time.
• Safe work: There is virtually no risk; you do not have to invest in products or services to market, but rather "promote" our items. Likewise, we do not incur any costs if the process does not work.
• Simply sell what is related to your industry: If you happen to have a highly ranked cosmetics blog, the most logical option is to "promote" cosmetic products. If you have good content, you can generate sufficient traffic to direct to our website, which maintains your affiliate status.

Our affiliate system is technically based on cookies. An example could be as follows:

A customer visits the affiliate's blog or website and clicks on a link or banner that takes them to our website, placing a cookie in the user's browser.  If they eventually make a purchase, the process is tracked using the cookie, which is able to identify the affiliate and calculate the commission amount for the service.

The first step is to register as an affiliate on our website, for which you must send us the request from this page.

An administrator will carefully review each request to see if the medium you have chosen to promote our website meets our requirements.

A request can take on the following statuses:

• Request submitted: We are reviewing your request and commissions are not yet being generated, and you have partial access to the affiliate panel.
• Request accepted: Your request has been accepted and you can now start your work as an affiliate.
• Request rejected: Your request has not been accepted. If you would like to know more reasons, contact us at info@international-cosmetic.com indicating your registration email.

Every time the status of your account is updated, you receive an email at the email address indicated during registration.

We reserve the right to block or suspend your affiliate account at any time if we detect fraud, abuse, or a clear violation of our affiliate terms and conditions.

While your account is blocked or suspended, we will investigate the matter and contact you (you will also receive an email regarding this).  No affiliate commissions will be generated while your account is blocked or suspended.

Once your account has been accepted and activated, from My Account -> Affiliate Dashboard you will have access to everything you need, including statistics, commission and payment reports, and the affiliate link generator.

Once you have registered and submitted your application to become an affiliate, we will review all the information, and if your application is accepted, all you will have to do is click on the Login icon (top right of our website) and log in with the email and password you used during registration.

Once logged in, go to My Account -> Affiliate Dashboard.

This is the main dashboard of your affiliate account. On it you can see statistics and details such as:

• Affiliate Rate: The percentage of commission you earn on sales.
• Total Earnings: The total earnings or commissions you have generated since becoming an affiliate.
• Total Paid: The commission payments that have been paid to you.
• Total Refunded: Customers have the right to change their minds and return their purchased products by requesting a refund. In this situation, the total (or partial) order amount and your commissions are also refunded and will no longer be paid.
• Visits: The number of times a unique user has clicked on an affiliate link on your website or blog, redirecting to our website.
• Conversion Rate: The percentage of visits you have generated to our website that have made a purchase or order.

In the commissions panel you can see all the commissions you have generated, detailed by product sold.  You can filter the commissions by date.

The status of the commissions is linked to the status of an order:

• Unconfirmed: This status generally appears when the customer pays by Bank Transfer, or during the period of time in which the payment gateway sends us confirmation that the payment has been made.  If the customer has paid by transfer, this is the status that will appear until they make the transfer, we verify that it has been made, and the order changes to paid.
• Pending: The status that a commission takes once the order has been paid, whatever the payment method.  It means that the commission is ready to be paid to you.
• Cancelled: When the status of the order changes to cancelled or failed.  There are various reasons why this status may appear, the most common is that the customer starts the payment through a gateway such as Aplazame or Bizum, and abandons the process without completing the payment.  Or incorrect data when entering their card details.
• Refunded: When the status of the order changes to refunded.  The refund can be total (for all products purchased) or partial (for some of the products purchased). The amount will only be deducted from the commissions of those products that the customer has returned.
• Paid: The commissions that have been deposited into your Stripe account.

NOTE: On certain occasions, if the customer who made the purchase has obtained a free product at a cost of 0, you will see these products in the commissions panel, but free products do not generate a commission since they are free for the customer.

Find more information in Commissions and Payments

In this panel you can check the performance of your affiliate links with all the clicks made on them during the last 60 days.  You can filter the clicks by date.

The status can vary between:

• Not Converted: It is a click made by a customer on one of your affiliate links, but who in the end did not make a purchase on our website.
• Converted: It is a click made by a customer on one of your affiliate links, and who ended up making a purchase on our website.

In this panel you can check all the commission payments that have been made to your Stripe account. You can filter the payments by date.

Commission payments are made on the 1st of each month, and include all outstanding commissions older than 30 days. We allow this 30-day period because it is the period during which the customer can return the products, and therefore, it would affect the status of the commission. Once these 30 days have passed, the commission is ready to be transferred to your Stripe account.

A payment therefore contains or can contain multiple commissions. The status of a payment can vary between:

• Pending: International Cosmetic has made the transfer or payment of the commissions to your connected Stripe account, and we are waiting for Stripe to confirm the operation.
• Completed: Stripe has confirmed that the transfer has been successful and is on its way or already in your Stripe account.

See more information in Commissions and Payments

In this panel you can generate as many affiliate links as you want. By default, when your affiliate account is activated, you are assigned an affiliate ID and a main or referral link that will be of the type: https://www.international-cosmetic.com?ref_afiliado=XXXXX. This link, when clicked by a customer, would take them to our homepage www.international-cosmetic.com. Your affiliate ID is passed in the URL, so when it is detected by our website, we know which affiliate it comes from and to whom to assign the commissions.

Since only products generate commissions when purchased by a customer, you will often want to share a link not to our homepage but to a specific product. Imagine you have created a post on your website talking about one of our products, e.g. Skin Perfecting 2% BHA Liquid, and you want to generate an affiliate link that redirects directly to this product. To do this, you must first go to that product on our website, copy the URL which would be: https://www.international-cosmetic.com/tienda-online-cosmetica/exfoliantes/skin-perfecting-2-bha-liquid/ , paste it in the URL field of the page, and press the Generate button. In this way, you will be provided with the affiliate link with your ID which would be: https://www.international-cosmetic.com/tienda-online-cosmetica/exfoliantes/skin-perfecting-2-bha-liquid/?ref_afiliado=XXXXX. This is the link you should put on your website, blog, or the electronic medium you have chosen to promote our site.

If once you have generated the link, instead of putting it on your website or blog, you want to share it on social media, by email or WhatsApp, you can do so in the Share section. Following the previous example, when sharing the generated link, a link is created with the image, name and brief description of the product (in this case Skin Perfecting 2% BHA Liquid), with a link to that product and which already includes your affiliate ID, so that when someone clicks that shared link, our system will be able to know where that visit comes from and to whom to assign the commissions. The options currently available in Share are: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Email and WhatsApp.

These are the settings you complete and submit when signing up as an affiliate, but you can change them later here.  In addition, you can configure which types of email notifications you want to receive.

If you change the “Website” or “How you will promote our site” settings, they will be reviewed by us again to ensure everything is correct.

Every time someone coming from one of your affiliate links makes a purchase, a commission will be generated for you. Only the products or services we offer on our website generate commissions. There are some exceptions:

• Purchases made by the affiliate themselves do not generate commissions.
• The free gift products we offer on our website do not generate commissions.
• Products that are refunded to the customer or returned do not generate commissions.

When a customer visits our website through an affiliate link and makes a purchase, in addition to the commission for that purchase, a link is established in that customer's profile with your affiliate ID.  Therefore, you not only earn commissions for that customer you have brought to the website, but also for any future purchases that customer may make on our website, even if they access it directly (without clicking an affiliate link).

You have succeeded in bringing us this customer, and we will assign you commissions for that customer's future purchases.

There is one exception that may change the link in the customer's profile: If the customer, while browsing the website,  clicks on another affiliate's link and makes a purchase through it, this new affiliate will be assigned to them, so the commissions for that customer's future purchases will be assigned to the new affiliate, even if they access our website directly.

When calculating the commission, you must take into account that this calculation is based on the product cost excluding VAT and excluding Discounts.

• If a product has no discount, the commission rate is applied to the result of subtracting the VAT from the product price.
• If a product has a discount, the commission rate is applied to the result of subtracting the VAT and the discount from the product price

The discounts we generally use on our website are coupon discounts and percentage discounts applied directly to products.

NOTE: Commissions for the first purchase or subsequent purchases by the same customer are calculated as follows:

1. First Purchase: The full amount of your agreed commission rate.
2. Subsequent Purchases: 70% of your agreed commission rate (even if the customer accesses our website directly without clicking on one of your affiliate links)

The general rates for all new affiliates will be those agreed upon with International Cosmetic.  Contact info@international-cosmetic.com

There are specific product rates that override the above.  That is, if a particular product has a commission rate of 15%, that will be the rate assigned to you, overriding your affiliate rate.

Currently, there are no commission rates assigned to products; we will update this section in the future so you know which products may be more profitable and generate more commission for you when you promote them.

We use a third-party system to handle payments through stripe.com and its Stripe Connect platform. You must follow the process to connect your Stripe account to ours and keep it connected for the duration of our relationship so that we can transfer the commissions to your Stripe account. You can review the terms and conditions of Stripe Connect here.

Because the status of a commission is tied to the status of an order, if the order is in any of the following statuses no commission will be generated: refunded, on hold, unpaid, canceled, or failed.  Refunded orders may be partially refunded or fully refunded, so only the products that have been returned or refunded will not generate a commission.

We schedule the transfer of commissions to your connected Stripe account for the 1st day of each month. Stripe may have its own timelines for sending these transfers from your Stripe account to your bank account (which range from 3 to 7 days).