Getting started
What AffiliateRail is, how the pieces fit together, and the fastest route to a working program.
An affiliate program on AffiliateRail is four things: a tracking script on your site that remembers who sent each visitor, a Stripe connection that tells us when those visitors pay, commission flows that decide what each sale earns, and a partner portal where your affiliates pick up their links and watch their referrals convert.
You can have all four working in one sitting. The dashboard's own getting started page walks the same steps with live checks; these pages are the fuller version you can read ahead of time or come back to.
Quickstart
Sign up, install the script, connect Stripe in test mode, and watch a test sale attribute itself.
Concepts
The objects behind everything: partners, referrals, sales, commissions, payouts, and how money moves between them.
Authentication
API keys, scopes, live and test mode, and how assistants connect over MCP.
What makes it different
A few decisions shape everything else, so they are worth knowing on day one:
- Payouts are non-custodial. Your PayPal or Wise account pays your partners directly. AffiliateRail computes who is owed what and instructs your account; the money never passes through us, and we charge nothing on it. Your partners never do identity verification with us either, because we never hold their money.
- One flow can hold many rules. A commission flow is an ordered list of branches, each a condition and a rate. A three-tier ladder, a monthly-versus-yearly split, or a first-year-only deal is one flow, not three.
- Stripe test mode works fully. Connect a test-mode Stripe account and the whole loop runs: clicks, attribution, sales, commissions. You can prove your setup before a real customer ever pays.
- Everything explains itself. Every commission records which flow and which branch produced it. Every unattributed sale says what was missing. Every ineligible payout carries its reason. When a partner asks "why", the answer is one click away.