I still remember that demo call. OK it was actually not long ago, but this fitness brand came to ReferralCandy with three instructors it wanted to pay for product sales. The team managing their influencer marketing efforts had a checklist that they brought to their demo call and they were going to evaluate ReferralCandy against it (no pressure for the salesguy -me). They needed individual links, a dashboard where instructors could check their performance, and something straightforward and simple to manage, because the life of an influencer marketing manager is already stressful enough. They first wanted to get a small program running, with a system that can easily scale, and build from there.
I thought: “easy”. ReferralCandy covers all of that. But my goal with this article is not to necessarily sell ReferralCandy to you – you’ll be able to make that judgment yourself.
No, my goal with this article is that it serves as a useful starting point for anyone reading it who is looking to launch a creator commission program: you have people you want to work with, and you need a clear way to connect their promotion to their earnings.
On Shopify (or any other ecommerce store), an affiliate program app (or plugin) handles that connection in a stress-free way for affiliate marketers. ReferralCandy’s affiliate campaigns let you bring in your own creators, give them links and codes, set rewards, and manage commissions, and you can use that workflow for creator partnerships without making a customer referral program the focus of your launch. But we’ll talk about that later.
Now, before choosing an app, you’ll need to work through the decisions it will need to support. The commission rate is one of them: Which purchases qualify? What can creators see? Without forgetting that how money reaches them matters just as much (if not more!).
Agree on what you’re paying content creators to do
A content creator might produce a video for your ads, recommend your product to their audience, or do both, but you need to be specific about the work you want and how you’ll compensate it.
For example, if you’re buying a set of videos, the immediate deliverable is the content. If you’re offering a sales commission, the creator makes money when an eligible purchase is attributed to them. That’s easy to understand and follow (or should be!), and a partnership can include both a content fee and commissions, with a clear agreement about each.
This distinction comes up in merchant conversations quite often. One DTC apparel brand I talked to not too long ago described paying ambassadors for code usage while paying other creators a fixed fee for content. Another brand (I can’t remember what they sell) wanted recurring payments for a set number of videos, regardless of the sales those videos generated.
See what I mean? Those merchants needed to manage different arrangements, and a commission dashboard alone wouldn’t tell them whether a creator had delivered the agreed videos.
For your first program, start with creators whose audience and work fit what you’re selling, and if you already have those relationships, discuss the proposed offer with them before building a complicated set of affiliate reward tiers. You don’t know if that’s what they’re looking for. Instead, you need to establish whether they’re interested, what they plan to share, and whether they expect a separate content fee, and leave the technical stuff for later.
Because the technical stuff that comes later is actually the easy part. Once you’ve figured out the baseline of the partnership with your content creators, then and only then can you choose software for the arrangement you’ve agreed to.
Define the commission before sending out links
A commission percentage only becomes meaningful and useful when everyone understands what it applies to. Otherwise it just adds more questions than answers.
Write down the basic terms of your offer:
- The reward: a fixed amount per qualifying purchase (eg. “$15 per referred purchase”) or a percentage (eg. “5% of the sale”) of the eligible order value.
- The purchases that count: customer eligibility, minimum spend, and whether subsequent purchases can earn another commission (eg. must be a new customer, spending over $45).
- The calculation: how discounts affect the amount used to calculate commission, and whether shipping and taxes are excluded (“are we calculating the commission on the subtotal amount?”)
- The payment conditions: the review period (eg. wait past the return policy to make sure that the order doesn’t get refunded), treatment of refunds, payment method, and expected payout timing.
Keep the initial offer easy to explain so if a creator asks what they’ll earn from a sale, your answer should follow directly from these terms. Or better yet, offer them an affiliate dashboard where they can track all of this without having to ask you.
Work backward from the money available
Now, what can you actually afford to pay? I’d start with what’s left after the customer discount, the cost of the product, fulfillment, payment processing, and any shipping you’re covering –all stuff you already know by heart– so the creator’s commission and the cost of running the program both have to fit into that amount.
It’s tempting to discuss the audience discount and the creator’s commission separately, especially when you’re negotiating with someone you’re excited to work with, but both come out of the same sale. Give the customer a bigger discount and you’ve reduced the room available for commission, so work through the two together, including what happens during your store’s usual promotions.
For a percentage reward, the calculation itself is straightforward:
Creator commission = eligible purchase amount × commission rate
In ReferralCandy, that eligible amount is the purchase subtotal after discounts, before taxes and shipping. So when you discuss a percentage with a creator, make sure you’re both applying it to the same amount. You can see how that calculation works here.
Then take the offer back to the people you want to work with. What do they think about it? Does it make sense for them? Would they be comfortable recommending the product to their audience? A rate that works in your spreadsheet still needs a creator who wants to participate.
Be precise about eligible customers and repeat orders
Say someone discovers your store through a creator and places an order, then they like your product so much that they come back later and buy again. Does the creator earn a second commission? (My opinion? Yes. But this is up to you) and what if the person using their code was already your customer before they ever saw the creator’s content? (Then in that case, no. I’d make it clear to your content creators that the goal is to drive new customers –unless you have a different idea!)
I’d settle those questions before anyone starts promoting the program. They affect what you’re promising to pay.
With ReferralCandy, by default an existing customer cannot be newly referred by an affiliate. Someone already referred by that affiliate stays linked to them, and later purchases can earn commissions according to your campaign settings, so check that this matches the arrangement you have in mind (and more on customer eligibility here).
The reward conditions let you set a minimum spend and decide whether the first purchase, every purchase, or the first specified number of purchases from a referred customer can qualify.
Different deals for different creators? Bring those into the demo, too. Ask to see how you’d configure them, particularly if you want commission tiers, because a tier based on monthly sales and one based on the number of referrals are different things, even if both get described as “tiered commissions.” You want to see your actual agreement working in the app.
Give each creator a clear route from promotion to sale
In another merchant conversation, the distinction was pretty straightforward: creating discount codes in Shopify was easy enough and that’s not what they needed us for. What the merchant needed help with was tracking the sales each influencer generated and connecting those sales to payments (whether it’s cash, gift cards, donations to charities, etc).
That tells you what to look for when evaluating the software: The customer gets their discount, the right creator gets credit, and you can see what you owe them. That is the whole sequence you need to follow when you test it.
Start with how the creator actually shares your products. For example, if they’re including a clickable link, make sure they know where to find theirs. If they’re mentioning an offer in a video, a recognizable code may be easier for their audience to remember and use at checkout. Either way, you need to give them instructions that fit the content they’re making.
On Shopify, ReferralCandy lets the store admin customize a creator’s code when the campaign uses a coupon offer (I’d agree on that code before the creator films or publishes anything, because changing it disables the old one) and having to ask someone to update a video because you changed their code is an unnecessary headache, so prevent it at all costs (and here’s more info on How to customize affiliate codes).
Also ask what happens when a shopper clicks today and buys later. ReferralCandy’s cookie-based recognition depends on the browser, device, and whether the cookies are still available, and explain those limits to creators when discussing how sales are tracked, because it directly affects their revenue!
Before inviting more people, check the link, the customer offer, and whether an eligible purchase appears against the correct creator. Use the app’s testing instructions for this; your own test purchase can otherwise get caught by self-referral checks.
Show creators what they’ve earned and when they’ll receive it
Put yourself in the creator’s position for a moment: You’ve shared the product, people have started clicking, and now you want to know whether any of that has turned into sales. Where do you look? And if there’s a commission showing, when can you expect the money?
Money is always an anxiety-inducing topic so you need to make this very easy and clear for your content creators so they feel comfortable working with you. Ideally the creator can answer these questions themselves without sending your team another email.
How do we fix this? Well, ReferralCandy’s affiliate portal gives creators their link, performance information, commission rate, pending commissions, and payout history. When you’re looking at the app, spend some time in that view as well. If you were an influencer, would you understand what was happening if you were the person promoting the product?
Payment timing deserves a clear explanation in the welcome email. In ReferralCandy, an eligible purchase has to clear the review period (as I mentioned earlier, to prevent refunds or cancellations in referred purchases -more in a second), and cash payouts need to be funded before they’re processed. A purchase marked “rewardable” is eligible for a reward but the payment may still be pending, so just make sure that you also make it clear for your influencers how cash reward timing works.
Then there’s the less exciting, but necessary, question of refunds. My recommendation is to set the review period with your return window in mind. For Shopify, ReferralCandy treats a fully refunded purchase as having a value of zero. Check that setting before launch. Reward conditions and refunds.
Once you’ve worked through this, explain it in plain language: what qualifies, how long the review takes, what has to happen before payment, and who to contact if something looks wrong. “You’ll get paid automatically” leaves a creator with questions when their first commission is still pending. Don’t let people think that “automatically” means “instant” if that’s not the case.
Choose a payout process your team can run
One merchant described paying influencers by entering each amount into PayPal individually, which is an incredibly tedious task when you have ten thousand other tasks that require your attention. Instead, they wanted a way to authorize the payments and handle them together. If you’re already doing this manually, you probably have a pretty clear idea of which part you’d like to stop doing.
Bring that process into the demo! Show how you pay people today, who checks the amounts, and who approves the money leaving the business, then ask what your team would still need to do after adopting the app.
For Shopify affiliate campaigns, ReferralCandy offers PayPal, Tremendous, and self-managed payouts. You choose the method for the campaign. The funding and payment process depends on that choice:
- PayPal or invoice-funded Tremendous: payouts are processed after successful billing.
- Balance-funded Tremendous: payouts depend on funds being available in your Tremendous account.
- Self-managed payouts: you export a CSV, pay creators outside ReferralCandy, then upload the updated CSV to record the payments.
You can compare the payout methods here.
Your finance team might want to keep an approval step, which is understandable. You might work with creators in different countries who need different payment options, or you may already like your payment process and mainly need help calculating what everyone is owed. Choose around those requirements, and check the options available to the people you’re paying.
By the end of the demo, you should be able to explain what happens on payment day and which tasks still belong to your team. Having run hundreds of demos for merchants, I’d say that this is a useful way to judge how much work the software will actually save you.
Evaluate the app with the program you intend to launch
Remember the fitness brand and its checklist? I’d just copy that approach. Come to the demo with the creators you want to invite, the offer you’ve discussed, and the way you expect to pay them. Give the person on the other side (me?) something specific to walk you through (we can handle a checklist).
Ask to follow a creator from joining the program through to earning a commission and receiving payment. For example, if you need a particular tier calculation or an invoice approval step, include it, because you should leave knowing how your program would work.
For a small group you already know, direct invitations may be enough, and if you’re accepting applications, decide who’ll review them. In ReferralCandy, invited partners join directly, or you can ask people to apply and then manually review them (this is how you’ll be managing affiliate signups with ReferralCandy)
Once you’ve set things up, walk one of your creators through it! Do a test run and let them find their link, explain the audience offer back to you, and show you where they’d check their earnings. If something is confusing, you’ve found it while it’s still easy to fix.
Then start with a group you can support personally and use their questions to improve the process as you go, then watch the sales and the costs together, because you want to know what the program contributes after you’ve paid for it.
If you already have creators in mind, take that first group and explore ReferralCandy’s affiliate campaigns around the offer you want to make them. Follow a sale through to payment, give them clear instructions, and get the program running. You can build from there, just like the fitness brand planned to do!
See you at my next demo?