How are the estimated earnings calculated?
Your account area and your stores show an Estimated Earnings figure. This is calculated from affiliate link clicks and checkouts in your stores.
The calculation
Every time a visitor clicks through from your store to a merchant, your store records the price of the product they clicked. Two rates turn that total into estimated earnings:
- Conversion rate: the share of clicks that end in a sale. The default is 10%.
- Commission rate: what the merchant pays you on a sale. The default is 10%.
Estimated earnings = total price of clicked products × conversion rate × commission rate
Checkouts through your store's cart use the same two rates.
An example
Say your store sent 40 clicks to Amazon last month, and the products behind those clicks were worth $2,000 in total. With the default rates, your estimated earnings would show $2,000 × 10% × 10% = $20.
Set your own rates
Go to Settings > General in your account area and find Estimated earnings. Enter the conversion rate and commission rate from your own affiliate reports, then save. Every estimate in your account and your stores uses your rates from then on. They change the estimate only, never a payout.
This is an estimation
Use the figure to compare your stores against each other and to spot which ones send the most valuable traffic. Do not treat it as money you are owed.
Where to find your real earnings
Only the merchant knows what was actually bought. Log in to your affiliate account with Amazon, eBay, Walmart or AliExpress to see your confirmed sales and commissions. Etsy is not in that list because Etsy commissions are paused.
There is more on this in Why are my sales and commissions not showing?
Why we show an estimate at all
Merchants do not send sales data back to your store, so without an estimate there would be no money figure anywhere in your account. The estimate is useful: it tells you which of your stores send the most valuable traffic, and which niches pull in higher priced products.
Rates vary
The defaults are single flat rates across every merchant, chosen to keep the figure simple and consistent. Real conversion and commission rates differ by merchant and by product category, and they change from time to time. Your own rates from your affiliate reports give a closer estimate.