What commission rate should I offer?

Whatever your gross margin can carry after cost of goods, shipping and payment fees — not whatever your competitors advertise. We build the table with you and show what is left on each sale at each rate, by partner type. If the honest answer is that the margin does not support a competitive rate, you find that out in week one rather than after a quarter of paying out.

Which platform will you use?

It depends on your cart, the countries you need to pay into, and whether you are selling one-off orders or subscriptions. Refersion, Tapfiliate and the Shopify apps such as Goaffpro or UpPromote suit smaller stores. Impact and PartnerStack are heavier and priced accordingly, and are worth it mainly when you need serious partner management or recurring SaaS commissions.

How soon does an affiliate program make money?

Slower than paid media and it compounds better. The build is three to eight weeks, and revenue follows partner recruitment, which is relationship work measured in months. Anyone promising quick affiliate revenue is describing a coupon site deal, which is a different thing and usually a worse one.

Do I need a lawyer for the terms?

Yes, and what we produce is the checklist to hand them — cookie duration, prohibited traffic, brand bidding, payout schedule, clawbacks on returns. It is written so a lawyer can turn it into an agreement quickly. We are not giving legal advice, and in the US there are also tax forms and reporting obligations around partner payouts that your accountant should see.

Will affiliates just take credit for sales I would have got anyway?

Some of them will try, and the structure is what stops it. Coupon and cashback sites sit at the end of journeys that were already converting, which is why they get their own lower tier, their own attribution rules and, in some programmes, no commission on orders that arrived by paid search on your own brand name.

Can this work for a SaaS product rather than a store?

Yes, and the structure differs. Recurring commissions, trial-to-paid attribution and a longer locking period before payout all need deciding up front, and the platform choice narrows to the ones that handle subscription billing events properly rather than one-off orders.

Paid Media & Performance

Affiliate program setup

Tracking, commission tiers and terms built against your real margin — so partners are paid for sales they caused, not for sales that were already happening.

From: $800–$6,000
Typical time: 3–8 weeks
Usually bought by: E-commerce, SaaS

What this actually solves

Paid media gets more expensive every year and it stops the moment you stop paying. An affiliate programme inverts the risk — partners promote at their own cost and are paid out of sales that actually happened. For a business watching acquisition costs climb, the appeal is obvious, and it is why owners ask for one.

What they usually get is a tracking app installed on the store and a signup form nobody fills in. The reason is that the app is not the programme. The programme is the commercial design underneath it — what you can afford to pay, to whom, for which kind of sale, under what conditions, with which sales excluded. Get that wrong and the mechanism works perfectly while transferring margin to people who did not earn it.

Every number in a well-built programme starts from your gross margin, not from what competitors advertise. A twenty percent commission is generous and sustainable on a sixty percent margin. On a twenty-five percent margin it is close to giving the product away, and worse if the partner claiming it is a coupon site attached to a sale that was already on its way to checkout. That arithmetic is the first hour of this engagement and it decides everything after it.

What we do, and in what order

Establish the real unit economics. Gross margin after cost of goods, shipping and payment fees; average order value; return rate; and, for subscription products, how long a customer typically stays. We work in your numbers, and where a number does not exist we say so rather than assuming one. Half a day to a day.
Choose the platform against your actual constraints. Cart and billing system, the countries you must pay into, whether commissions are one-off or recurring, and the fee model — some platforms take a percentage of what your partners earn, which changes the maths considerably at scale. Two to four days.
Design the commission architecture. Partner types priced separately, because a content creator building an audience, a comparison site with buying-intent traffic, and a coupon or cashback site at the very end of the journey are three different economic propositions. You get a table showing what remains on a sale at each rate for each type, so the decision is made with the consequence visible. Two to three days.
Build the tracking and the attribution rules. Partner links and coupon-code attribution, cookie duration, the locking period before a commission is payable, clawback on returns and cancellations, and deduplication against your paid media so a single order is never paid for twice. This is the technical core and where quiet errors get expensive. Three to five days.
Write the terms checklist. Cookie duration, prohibited traffic sources, the prohibition on bidding against your own brand terms, trademark use, payout schedule and minimum, and the conditions under which commission is withheld. Written for your lawyer to work from. Two to three days.
Prepare everything a partner needs on day one. Links, banners and product feed, a welcome sequence that explains the rules in plain language, and a dashboard walkthrough - because partners who cannot see their own numbers stop promoting within a month. Three to five days.
Set up recruitment groundwork and the payout routine. A researched list of who is already linking to your competitors, using Ahrefs or SEMrush, with an outreach approach for each type. Alongside it, the monthly operating routine — fraud checks for self-referrals and code leakage, the payout run through PayPal or Wise, and the tax forms that have to be collected before anyone is paid. One week.

What moves the price

The range is $800–$6,000 and the spread is wide because the scope genuinely is.

Platform and cart complexity. A Shopify store on a standard checkout is a known path. A custom checkout, a subscription biller, or a product that converts through a sales call needs webhook work and careful thought about when a commission becomes payable.

How many partner types and markets. One tier in one currency is straightforward. Several tiers, multiple currencies, and partners in countries with their own tax documentation requirements multiplies both the design and the operational setup.

Whether recruitment groundwork is in scope. The technical build can be delivered on its own. Researching prospective partners, building the outreach list and preparing the pitch is additional work with a different rhythm, and it is quoted as such.

What usually goes wrong

The commission rate is set before anyone checks the margin. Somebody looks at what similar brands offer, picks a round number, and launches. If the margin cannot carry it, every successful sale now loses money, and the programme's growth becomes the problem rather than the goal. Worse, cutting a published rate later damages the relationships you spent months building. Decide it once, with the table in front of you.

Coupon and cashback partners get paid for sales that were already closing. Someone is at checkout, sees an empty discount code box, opens a new tab, searches for a code, clicks a cashback link, comes back and completes the order that was going to happen anyway. Last click hands that partner the commission. The counters are structural — a separate lower tier for these partners, attribution rules that do not reward a click seconds before checkout, and reconsidering how prominent that discount field is.

The terms do not prohibit bidding on your own brand name. An affiliate runs search ads on your company name, intercepts people who were already searching for you, and takes a commission on customers you had already acquired — while simultaneously raising the price you pay for your own brand keywords. It looks like a wildly successful partner in the dashboard. It is one clause in the terms, and it has to be there before launch, because removing a permission later is far harder than never granting it.

See where the site stands before you brief anyone.

If the site is already live, start from what it scores rather than from a guess. The audit reports what it checked, what it found, and — the part most tools leave out — what it could not check, and why.

See the website audit Talk about this work

Questions people ask before they commit.

What commission rate should I offer?: Whatever your gross margin can carry after cost of goods, shipping and payment fees — not whatever your competitors advertise. We build the table with you and show what is left on each sale at each rate, by partner type. If the honest answer is that the margin does not support a competitive rate, you find that out in week one rather than after a quarter of paying out.
Which platform will you use?: It depends on your cart, the countries you need to pay into, and whether you are selling one-off orders or subscriptions. Refersion, Tapfiliate and the Shopify apps such as Goaffpro or UpPromote suit smaller stores. Impact and PartnerStack are heavier and priced accordingly, and are worth it mainly when you need serious partner management or recurring SaaS commissions.
How soon does an affiliate program make money?: Slower than paid media and it compounds better. The build is three to eight weeks, and revenue follows partner recruitment, which is relationship work measured in months. Anyone promising quick affiliate revenue is describing a coupon site deal, which is a different thing and usually a worse one.
Do I need a lawyer for the terms?: Yes, and what we produce is the checklist to hand them — cookie duration, prohibited traffic, brand bidding, payout schedule, clawbacks on returns. It is written so a lawyer can turn it into an agreement quickly. We are not giving legal advice, and in the US there are also tax forms and reporting obligations around partner payouts that your accountant should see.
Will affiliates just take credit for sales I would have got anyway?: Some of them will try, and the structure is what stops it. Coupon and cashback sites sit at the end of journeys that were already converting, which is why they get their own lower tier, their own attribution rules and, in some programmes, no commission on orders that arrived by paid search on your own brand name.
Can this work for a SaaS product rather than a store?: Yes, and the structure differs. Recurring commissions, trial-to-paid attribution and a longer locking period before payout all need deciding up front, and the platform choice narrows to the ones that handle subscription billing events properly rather than one-off orders.

Often taken together.

Start with the brief, not the invoice.

Send what you are trying to achieve. You get a written scope, a price and a date — or an honest “this is not the right service for that”.

Talk about Affiliate program setup All Paid Media & Performance services