We wish to pay affiliate referral fees on sales that are net of returns and zZounds has a 30 day return policy. After the 30 day return policy has passed, we need a standard 30 days for processing returns and issuing payments. We instituted this policy because, we’ve had problems from small affiliates that referred orders to zZounds, only to have all of the merchandise returned after we have already sent out the check for referral fees. Often these affiliates never referred any subsequent orders to zZounds, so that we could not use future referral fees to offset the ineligible referral fee that we had already paid. For affiliates that have a track record of generating sales month after month, we don’t have to worry about not recapturing commissions from returned merchandise. In these cases, we try to pay within 30 days.