Setting up tiers & affiliate payout correctly

Hi. I am finding the documentation for Affiliates Enterprise to be a little confusing, at least in the tiers and payout sections.

What I am trying to do is this. I want the majority of my affiliates to be paid 20% for direct commissions and 5% on secondary commissions. But I want to have special affiliates who I have manually edited to make their affiliate rate 40% for direct referrals and 10% on secondary referrals.

The terminology I’ve always seen used is that direct commissions are tier 1 (“Affiliate A” sends someone who orders, earning a tier 1 commission for “Affiliate A”) and then if Affiliate A gets someone (Affiliate B) to sign up through A’s link, then A earns a 2nd tier commission on B’s referred sales.

But it seems like you are using these terms as if direct referrals are sort of “Tier 0” and then secondary referrals are Tier 1 (even though I’d call this Tier 2), etc. I think this is part of my confusion.

Anyway, I have set my default referral rate to 0.2 and so am I correct in thinking I should check the “relative rates” box on the Tiers page and then set Tier 1 to .25 (making it 25% of 20%) and then I don’t need to bother with Tier 2 if I don’t want to pay A for C’s referrals?

Then if I manually edit Affiliate A and set their referral rate to 0.4, then any sales they refer directly will earn them 40% of the total sale.

And if they refer Affiliate B, B will earn A a total of 10% of that sale, but B will (unless I edit them manually) earn the default 20% of the sale.

Is that correct?

I want to get this set up correctly so everyone is paid the correct amount. Thank you for the clarification.