Payout methods
Which methods pay themselves and which you pay by hand, why that split exists, and how the Payoneer batch file is used.
Partners choose how they want to be paid from the methods you offer. Some of those methods run themselves once you have connected your own account, and some you pay by hand from a file we build for you. Which is which is not arbitrary, and the reason is worth two minutes because it is also the reason your partners never do identity checks with us.
The split
| Method | How it is paid | What the partner gives |
|---|---|---|
| PayPal | Automatic, from your own PayPal Business balance | The email on their PayPal account |
| Wise | Automatic, from your own Wise Business balance | Their bank details, in their own currency |
| Payoneer | By hand, from your own Payoneer account, one file at a time | The email on their Payoneer account |
| Bank transfer | By hand, from your own bank | Their bank details |
| International wire | By hand, from your bank | Their IBAN and SWIFT/BIC |
| Crypto | By hand, from your own wallet | A wallet address and its network |
Offer only what you are willing to pay out. You set that under Program settings, How partners can be paid, and the partner portal shows partners exactly the list you chose.
Why some of them are manual
Every payout on AffiliateRail is non-custodial: your money goes from your account to your partner, and never through ours. That is what keeps us out of money-transmission territory, and it is why your partners never verify their identity with us. It also decides which methods can be automatic: we can only automate a rail that lets you hand us your own credentials to use on your own account.
PayPal and Wise both do that. You create credentials on your own business account, we store them encrypted, and we call their API on your behalf.
Payoneer does not. Payoneer issues payout API credentials only through an approved integration partnership, and that partnership is between Payoneer and us, with funds routing through our balance rather than yours. Taking it would make us a custodian of your partners' money, so we have not applied for it and will not.
What Payoneer does support is paying from your own account in bulk, from a file. That is a real answer rather than a lesser one, and it is the same shape bank transfer, wire and crypto have had here since the beginning.
A manual payout stays pending in AffiliateRail until you mark it paid. Nothing auto-completes, because nothing happened automatically. Marking it paid is what closes the commission out and what your partner sees.
The Payoneer batch file
Generate a batch on the Payouts page, as normal. Payoneer partners appear in it alongside everyone else.
Export the Payoneer file. On the batch, open Export CSV and choose the Payoneer batch file. It contains only the payouts on this batch whose method is Payoneer, in one currency.
Upload it to Payoneer. Sign in to Payoneer and open their bulk payment screen, where you download their own template and upload a filled one. Ours is written in that shape: recipient email, amount, currency, description, with the header row Payoneer requires.
Approve the payments in Payoneer. They show you the batch before anything moves, which is your last chance to check the total.
Come back and mark them paid in AffiliateRail, so your partners see it and the commissions close.
What the file contains, and what it cannot know
Column A is the email address on the partner's Payoneer account, which is often not the address they sign in to your portal with. That is why the portal asks for it separately and validates it there rather than assuming.
If a partner has chosen Payoneer and not filled that in, the export refuses to build the file and names the partner, rather than writing a blank row Payoneer would reject on upload.
Payoneer's own limit on rows per file depends on which batch product your account uses, and their published figures differ between products and regions. We refuse a file above 1,000 rows, the largest figure they document anywhere, so we never block a file Payoneer would have taken. The number to trust is the one printed on the template you download inside your own Payoneer account. If your batch is larger than that number, export it as more than one file.
Choosing what to offer
Two rules of thumb.
Offer the automatic rails if you have the accounts, because they remove a recurring manual job from your month. Offer the manual ones when your partners are somewhere those rails do not reach well, which is the usual reason Payoneer comes up at all.
Whatever you offer, a partner who cannot be paid is never dropped silently: their payout row exists with the reason on it, and Payouts lists every reason and who can fix it.