How to start an affiliate program, step by step

Decide what you pay

Everything starts with the commission. It has to leave margin after the sale, and give the affiliate a reason to recommend you rather than someone else. Two questions are enough to set it: how much a sale earns you once your costs are paid, and what share of that you would give for a customer you would not otherwise have had.

• For a subscription, decide whether the affiliate earns their share on every renewal, for life, or for a set number of months.
• For a store, choose the basis: the amount paid, or the amount net of payment fees and taxes.
• For several audiences, create several plans: one for creators, one for partners, one for your customers.

Write the terms

The terms say what happens in the awkward cases. They are set once, per plan, and the affiliate accepts them when signing up.

• The attribution window: how long after the click a sale goes to the affiliate. Sixty days by default at Meritt.
• The validation period: how long a commission waits before it can be paid, to cover refunds.
• The payout minimum: below it, the balance waits for the next batch.
• Purchases by the affiliate themselves: refused automatically at attribution.

The article on refunds after a commission is paid helps set the validation period.

Choose the tool

Three criteria decide the rest. Tracking has to survive ad blockers, so it has to run through your own domain. The tool has to read sales where you already take payment — Stripe, Shopify, PayPal — without a second checkout. And its price should not grow with your success: a percentage of your sales costs more and more as the program works. The ranking of the best affiliate software sorts them by use case.

Set the program up with Meritt

The Meritt setup wizard has five steps, in this order.

1. Workspace: your company name; each brand has its own workspace, with its affiliates and its invoices.
2. Sales: your site's address, and the payment system to connect.
3. Plan: the commission and its basis, with a worked example.
4. Link: where your links are served — on your domain, on a subdomain of yours, or on ours.
5. Check: you open a test link, and the click shows up within seconds.

The integrations detail each payment system, and the platforms the setup on your site.

Recruit the first affiliates

The first affiliates are nearly always people who already know you: happy customers, partners, people who talk about your field. Each plan has a signup link: send it, add affiliates yourself, or open public signup. Each one gets their link, their space, and a discount code if you assign one.

Pay for the first time

When commissions have passed their validation period, Meritt prepares a batch. You check it, approve it, it leaves your PayPal or Wise account, and each affiliate gets their self-billed invoice or receipt. A transfer that comes back is caught and corrected on both sides.

Follow what works

The dashboard shows clicks, sales, commissions and what is still owed, per affiliate and over twelve months. Sales with no affiliate each carry their reason — a window that has passed, a buyer who came without a link — which says exactly what to fix. For the basics, see what affiliate marketing is.

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