Leakproof codes that coupon plugins can't scrape. Tiered commissions with overrides. Approval workflows. PayPal and Venmo payouts with 1099 collection built in. Built on the Affiliates template, alongside the same CRM as your ambassadors and influencers — so a great affiliate can graduate to a long-term partner without changing tools.
Book a DemoYou hand each affiliate a discount code and a tracking link. Within a week, the code's on Honey and a Reddit thread. A coupon-plugin user redeems it at checkout, never having clicked anyone's link, and you owe a commission on a sale you didn't actually source. Meanwhile, real referred customers ignore the code, buy at full price, and your top affiliate gets nothing for the customer they sent. Every month-end becomes the same exercise: open the spreadsheet, reconcile the orders, eyeball the dispute rate, hope the math is close enough to ship payouts on time.
"We were giving them codes and trying to string together an affiliate program that required a lot of manual work and matching at the end of every month so that we could properly pay our influencers."— Dylan, Hewn
TODO — Jeff: rewrite this in your voice. ~60–80 words.
An affiliate program is performance compensation. The deal is straightforward — you drive a sale, you get paid for it — and the entire program lives or dies on whether you can actually trust the attribution. Roster's job is to make the math defensible: every click traced, every code unique, every sale tied to a person, every payout reconcilable on a CFO's first pass. The relationship layer is optional. The clean attribution isn't.
When you create a new program in Roster, you pick a template — Ambassadors, Creators, Affiliates, Athletes, Customer Loyalty, or build from scratch. The Affiliates template ships with the right defaults: per-program commission rules turned on, leakproof code generation enabled, recurring-order attribution windows configured, batch payouts ready, and a portal layout that puts earnings, links, and pending payouts in front of affiliates first.
Flat rate, tiered by volume, performance bonuses, override hierarchies for sub-affiliates or agency partners — pick what fits the deal and lock it in. Approvals can be auto, manual, or auto-up-to-a-threshold. The structure lives at the program level, so you don't reconfigure it per affiliate or per month — you just add affiliates to the program.
Every affiliate gets a unique short link. The discount code isn't created until a customer clicks the link — minted single-use, applied at checkout, and gone. Coupon plugins find nothing to scrape. Real referred customers get the discount automatically. Every sale traces back to a click. Recurring-order attribution keeps your top affiliates credited for repeat purchases inside the window you set.
Payouts batch through PayPal, Venmo, ACH, gift cards, store credit, or six other rails — your call per affiliate. W-9 collection happens at onboarding, 1099s generate at year end. Disputes attach to the underlying order, so you're not reconciling a spreadsheet against a screenshot. Run the batch, approve the totals, send the payouts in one click.
Volume-based tiers, product-specific rates, performance bonuses, time-bounded promos. Whatever the deal looks like, the rule lives next to the program.
Sub-affiliates, agency partners, network managers — each gets their cut without a side-spreadsheet. Override math is part of the commission engine.
Codes mint at click time, single-use, gone after redemption. Honey and Capital One Shopping have nothing to scrape — and your CFO sees clean attribution.
Per-affiliate, per-link, per-channel — clicks, conversions, AOV, revenue. The numbers your team needs and the numbers your affiliates can see.
Repeat customers stay credited to the affiliate who sent them, inside the window you set. Top affiliates get paid for the long-tail revenue, not just the first click.
PayPal, Venmo, ACH, store credit, gift cards, eight more rails. W-9 at onboarding. 1099 at year end. The finance team stops asking.
Most "affiliate platforms" are link-tracking and a payout pipe — a layer over an existing affiliate network or a Shopify app that does coupon math. Roster runs the program the same way it runs ambassadors and creators: every affiliate is a contact in a CRM, every link is leakproof, every commission rule is configurable per program, and every payout is auditable down to the order. When you graduate one of those affiliates into something more — a brand ambassador, a content creator on retainer — they don't switch tools.
Looking at Social Snowball? See where each platform is strongest →
"Customers they're sending to us are buying stuff but they're not using the discount code. The affiliate wasn't being credited properly for their efforts."— Dylan, Hewn · on the problem leakproof codes solved
Book a 20-minute demo. We'll start from an Affiliates template, configure tiered commissions on a real product set, walk through the leakproof code flow at checkout, and show you what a clean batch payout looks like — including 1099 status per affiliate.
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