Affiliate payouts with PayPal.

Commissions accumulate into 30-day payout periods, and when a period closes you pay every affiliate in it with one click — straight from your own PayPal Business account. Daima calculates, you approve, PayPal delivers. Your money never passes through us.

Last updated · July 24, 2026

This is a Pro feature — and it's mandatory before you enable affiliates. Connecting PayPal is required before the affiliate program can be enabled or affiliates added. That's deliberate: it guarantees every affiliate has a payout rail from day one, so you never end up owing commissions with no way to pay them.

One-time setup — connect your PayPal Business account

You need three things, all on PayPal's side, all one-time:

  • A PayPal Business account. A personal account can't send payouts. Upgrading is free at paypal.com.
  • Payouts approval. PayPal gates its Payouts API behind a short application (in your PayPal business settings, look for "Payouts"). Approval typically takes up to 72 hours. You only do this once.
  • A REST API app. At developer.paypal.com → Apps & Credentials → Live tab → Create App. This gives you a Client ID and Secret — that pair is what you paste into Daima.

Then open Affiliates in the Daima admin, find the PayPal payouts section, and paste in the Client ID and Secret. Daima validates the credentials against PayPal live before saving — if they're wrong, you'll know immediately, not at payout time.

How your credentials are stored: your Secret is encrypted with AES-256-GCM before it touches the database and is decrypted only server-side, only at the moment a payout or status check runs. It's never visible to browsers, affiliates, staff, or other merchants — and it's deleted the moment you disconnect PayPal or uninstall the app.

How payout periods work

Confirmed commissions (conversions that survived the 7-day refund hold) accumulate into rolling 30-day payout periods. While a period is open you can watch it grow on the Affiliates page. When it closes, Daima:

  • Totals each affiliate's confirmed commissions for the period
  • Emails you a payout-due summary with the full breakdown
  • Shows a Pay with PayPal review screen: every affiliate, every amount, and anyone who can't be paid yet (no payout email on file) — before anything is sent

One click sends the whole batch through PayPal's Payouts API. Each affiliate receives their money directly from your PayPal account, along with an email notification from Daima confirming the payment.

Delivery statuses — and why "unclaimed" means paid

After a batch is sent, Daima polls PayPal and shows per-affiliate delivery status:

  • Success — delivered to the affiliate's PayPal account.
  • Unclaimed — the money has left your account and PayPal is holding it, because the recipient email isn't attached to a PayPal account yet. The affiliate gets an email from PayPal telling them how to claim it. If unclaimed after 30 days, PayPal returns the funds to you.
  • Pending — in transit at PayPal; almost always resolves on its own.
  • Failed — the payment did not go out (e.g., your PayPal balance was insufficient, or Payouts isn't approved). Failed items — and only failed items — can be retried after you fix the cause; Daima shows PayPal's exact error message.

Double-payment protection: Daima treats Success, Unclaimed, and Pending as sent, because in all three cases the funds have left your account. Only hard failures are ever retryable, and every batch carries an idempotency key — so the same period can never be paid twice, even if you click twice or retry after a network error.

Typo-proof payouts via Log in with PayPal

The most common payout failure is a mistyped PayPal email — the payment goes out "unclaimed" to an address nobody owns. Daima closes that hole: affiliates who sign in to their dashboard with PayPal are paid by their PayPal-verified account identifier instead of a typed email. For those affiliates, a misdirected payout is impossible. Encourage your affiliates to use the "Log in with PayPal" button on their dashboard at least once.

What stays your responsibility

  • Funding. Payouts draw on your PayPal balance. If the balance can't cover the batch, items fail — top up, then retry the failed items.
  • PayPal fees. PayPal charges its own per-payout fees per your PayPal agreement. Daima adds nothing.
  • Tax reporting. Commission payments to affiliates may be reportable (e.g., IRS Form 1099 in the US). Daima's payout records (kept 7 years) give you the paper trail, but filing is on you.
  • Returned unclaimed funds. If PayPal returns an unclaimed payment after 30 days, re-issuing it is your call — coordinate with your affiliate to fix their payout email first (or have them sign in with PayPal).

Full legal terms for the payout feature live in our Terms of Service (Section 8A).