Trolley is a global payments platform that allows you to manage and send your affiliate payouts from one convenient dashboard. With the Refersion – Trolley integration, you can easily leverage Trolley to make bulk Paypal and/or bank transfer payments to all of your Refersion affiliates. Trolley can also manage affiliate tax information for easy year-end reporting.
Table of contents:
Overview of Our Integration with Trolley
Below you can watch a bit of an introductory video that highlights what both merchants and affiliates will see when utilizing Refersion's integration with Trolley.
Please read on for more detailed setup instructions.
For Merchants: Getting Started with Trolley
To take advantage of the Refersion - Trolley integration, you will first need to open an account with Trolley, here. After you have submitted your details during the sign-up process, a Trolley representative will follow up with you to initiate the account onboarding process.
However, the Trolley team will guide you through each step of the process, and work with you to ensure that the account onboarding process is completed as seamlessly as possible.
Please note: Activating a Trolley account may take 3+ business days. Each of Trolley’s banking partners have unique business registration and compliance requirements that will need to be completed before an account can be opened. Trolley is only licensed to onboard businesses with legal entities registered or headquartered in the United States, Canada, the European Economic Area (EEA), United Kingdom & Gibraltar, Australia or New Zealand.
Please note: There are certain types of businesses that are not supported by Trolley. A full list can be found in Trolley's Terms of Service. The types of businesses that are not supported include but are not limited to:
MLM (Pyramid Schemes / Direct Selling companies)
Firearms
Cannabis / CBD
Adult Entertainment
Gambling
Cryptocurrency
For Merchants: Payment Methods
After you have completed the onboarding process, and your Trolley account has been activated, you will be able to set up the payment methods that you will use to send your affiliate payouts through Trolley.
Bank Transfer
To set up bank transfers as a payout method, log into your Trolley Dashboard and navigate to Settings > Payout Methods, then click the “Bank Transfer” box:
On the Bank Transfer page that appears next, make sure to enable this as an active payout method by changing the switch at the top right from “Not Enabled” (grey) to “Enabled” (green).
In the next section, Trolley lists their available payout countries (all countries will be enabled by default). The best practice is to leave all countries enabled:
After you have enabled bank transfers and payout countries, you will need to fund your Trolley account in order to send your first batch of payments. Trolley offers 3 account funding options, listed here with timeframes:
ACH Bank Transfer (1-2 business days)
Wire Transfer (next business day)
Direct Debit (up to 5 business days)
Instructions on how to fund your Trolley account for each of those 3 options can be found here.
Please note: In order to pay your affiliates via bank transfer, you will first need to make sure that the entire amount to be paid (including any fees covered by you, the Merchant) has been deposited to your Trolley account, and is available to send out. You can view your available Trolley account balance on the “Balances” page of your Dashboard:
PayPal
You can also use the Trolley platform to pay your affiliates via your PayPal Business Account. Trolley allows you to connect your PayPal account using the PayPal Payouts API (REST-based) integration. This Trolley guide will walk you through the appropriate steps to connect your PayPal account:
For Merchants: Connecting your Refersion account to Trolley
At this point, you are ready to make a direct connection between your Refersion account and Trolley.
Please note: Before you start, make sure that you turn off the PayPal integration in Refersion before connecting your Trolley account, otherwise you will not be able to enable the Trolley connection.
To connect your Trolley account to Refersion, you will first need to obtain API keys from Trolley. In your Trolley dashboard, click on Settings and then select API Keys from the Settings sub-menu:
On the “API Keys” page, click the + Create Production Key button in the top right hand corner to generate your API keys:
A pop-up window will appear, showing you an “Access Key” and a “Secret Key” that you will need to copy somewhere safe, since these API keys will later need to be pasted inside Refersion.
Please note: This is the only time that these specific API keys can be viewed or downloaded, and you will not be able to recover them later. However, if needed, you can always create new Trolley API keys at any time.
Head back to your Refersion account and navigate to Account > Settings > Trolley:
Please note: You may need to reach out to the Refersion customer success team to get this tab enabled on your account. Please email [email protected] for assistance.
This is where you’ll set up the Trolley integration.
First, select “Yes” under Enable Trolley payments through API.
Enter the Access Key and the Secret Key that you generated earlier into the corresponding boxes.
Choose what payment types you want to allow (note: ‘ACH Payments’ are bank transfers).
Please note: You can choose to enable both the ACH and PayPal payment types. This will allow your affiliates to choose how they want to be paid, but from your end you would have to be prepared to pay affiliates out through both methods. Alternatively, you can choose to allow only one of the payment types. Then your affiliates will only have the option to provide you with their bank or Paypal information based on what you have allowed.
Set the minimum payout threshold that needs to be reached before you send payouts to affiliates.
Please note: Due to bank transfer payment minimums as documented by Trolley, you may not be able to successfully send payments for very small amounts of commission to affiliates. For this reason we suggest setting the minimum payment threshold to 5 dollars
Once these details have been entered, Save Changes. Finally, copy the Trolley Webhook URL at the bottom of the page, and save it to paste into Trolley.
Now return to the Trolley dashboard, and navigate to Settings > Webhooks. Click +Add Webhook and in the pop-up window that appears, enter the webhook URL that you copied from Refersion. Next, select Model: All Models and Action: All Actions respectively. Finally, click on the Add Webhook button at the bottom right:
Please note: It’s important to add the Refersion Webhook to your Trolley account. Failure to do so will prevent affiliates from finishing their payment account setup and will cause you to miss important payment status messages.
Affiliate Payment Profiles
Once the Trolley connection to Refersion has been set up and enabled, your affiliates will need to complete their Trolley payment profiles, via their affiliate dashboard in Refersion.
Please note: Affiliate payment profiles in Trolley are identifiable by the Refersion “Affiliate ID”, which will automatically be set as the Trolley profile’s “Reference ID” to match. Please do not change an affiliate's Reference ID in Trolley. The affiliate ID in Refersion and the reference ID of the recipient in Trolley must be an exact match in order for you to send commission payments to your affiliates via our Trolley integration
After an affiliate has successfully completed their Trolley payment profile, it will register as “Active”, and they will be all set to receive their payments via Trolley.
Please note: Affiliates need to complete their Trolley payment profile so that it registers as “Active” before they can be sent payments. If their payment profile status is “Incomplete” (or any other non-active status), then you will not be able to send their payments until they have successfully completed all required details.
By default, a profile is "complete" in Refersion when the affiliate has submitted a Tax form and that tax form's status is showing as "Reviewed" in Trolley and the affiliate has submitted their payment information.
While we don't recommend this, you (the merchant) can update your Trolley settings to let affiliates be paid without having a tax form on file by visiting the Settings>Tax Compliance section in Trolley. If you scroll down to the section called "How would you like to handle payments to recipients without a Tax Form on file?" you can change the option to "Tax form not required".
For further Trolley-specific instructions and more information on how to work with the Trolley platform to send payments, you can review the guides available in the Trolley Help Center here.
For Affiliates: Adding a Payout Method
Affiliates working with merchants who are using our Trolley integration should see the following prompt when they sign into their affiliate dashboard:
By clicking on that prompt, you'll will be taken to the Settings>Payment Settings tab to fill out your Trolley payment profile and enter payment details.
To get started with filling out the profile, affiliates can click the Add Payout Method button.
The first thing that the affiliate will see after clicking this button is a form where they can enter their general information (name, address, etc). The affiliate will have the option to enter their information as either an individual or as a business. It is up to the affiliate to decide whether or not they intend to be paid as an individual or as a business.
After the affiliate fills out their general information and clicks Next, they will then be prompted to submit payment information. Their options for payment may include Bank Transfer or PayPal (depending on the merchant's flexibility). If the merchant can accommodate payments through both methods, then the affiliate can choose their preferred payment method.
Affiliates can even add information for both payment methods and then choose which of their methods is set as the active one.
Bank Transfer
As an affiliate if you will be receiving payment via bank transfer, then please select the Bank Transfer payout method. The information entered on this screen must exactly match the affiliate’s bank information. You will then see a form where you can enter your bank information. The information entered on this screen must exactly match the affiliate’s bank information.
If an incorrect routing number is entered, then an error message will appear. This should help reduce failed payments due to incorrect bank information.
Upon entering the correct routing number, the information for the affiliate’s financial institution should appear. Here's an example:
PayPal
For affiliates who choose to be paid via PayPal, they will only need to enter their PayPal email.
Once an affiliate has picked their payment method and filled out the requested information, they should see a success message. After clicking Done, the affiliate should see their payment method on their Settings>Payment Settings tab:
For Affiliates: Completing a Tax Form
If the merchant is taking advantage of Trolley’s tax product, then affiliates will also be prompted to add their tax information after they have submitted payment information.
We are required to collect your Tax information in order to send you payments. You can complete a tax form now, or you can choose to complete it later.
Please Note: If the dashboard prompts you to enter your tax information, then the merchant is required to collect your tax information in order to send you payments
We are not able to give advice on how you should file your taxes. We recommend that you contact a tax professional for any questions or recommendations.
The type of form that you are required to submit may depend on multiple factors (whether or not you are a US citizen and whether or not you are an individual or a corporation).
To get started with submitting tax information, affiliates can navigate to the Settings>Payment Settings tab of their affiliate dashboard and click the Complete a Tax Form button.
Follow the instructions on the following pages to submit your personal information and your tax identification information.
You will have a chance to review your information before you complete your tax form. A warning pop-up message will be displayed indicating that you will not be able to edit the form after it is submitted.
Once you click the Submit Form button, the following confirmation message will be displayed:
Click Done to close the message. The submitted tax form will be displayed in the Tax Forms section of your Settings>Payment Settings tab:
