We have launched Affiliatant, our third published product this year. It records affiliate referrals, decides which affiliate earned each sale, works out the commission and produces the paperwork for paying it.
It is aimed at anyone running an affiliate or referral programme who has outgrown a spreadsheet. The tracking covers shops, subscription businesses and anything with a receipt page. There is a free band that does not ask for a card, and the whole thing is built and run by us in the UK.
An affiliate programme has four separate jobs in it, and most of the work is in the middle two:
The click identifier is held server side. A cookie exists as a labelled fallback and is never the record, because Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention caps a cookie written by a script at seven days, and at 24 hours when the link carries certain parameters. Tracking that depends on that cookie quietly loses sales it then cannot report.
Visitor IP addresses are stored as a keyed hash and never in the clear, and consent is checked before an affiliate cookie is set. Tracking links may only point at hosts you have added to an allowed list, because a redirect that will forward a visitor to any address at all is an open redirect, and those get used to make a link to somebody else’s site look like a link to yours.
This is the part that causes arguments, so each decision is a record in its own right. It stores the model used, the attribution window as it stood on the day, every click that lost, and a reason code. Changing your window next month leaves last month’s decisions exactly as they were.
Coupon codes have explicit rules rather than an accident. You choose what happens when a shopper arrives through one affiliate’s link and then types a different affiliate’s code: the code wins, the click wins, or the code wins only when there is no click on file. One affiliate is credited in every case, and the affiliate who was not credited can be shown why.
Amounts are calculated in whole pennies. No rate is stored against a calculated figure, so an amount and a percentage cannot end up disagreeing with each other. Tax and shipping can be excluded if you choose.
Commission is held for a period you set, which should cover your returns window. A refund inside that period reverses the commission, and on the WooCommerce integration a part refund claws back the matching part rather than all of it.
When an affiliate is paid, the invoice has to come from somewhere. Affiliatant raises it as a self-billed invoice, which is the arrangement set out in HMRC’s VAT Notice 700/62, so the merchant issues the invoice on the affiliate’s behalf under an agreement with them.
Affiliatant then hands over a file listing who to pay and how much. The payment leaves your own bank, PayPal or Wise account. Affiliatant holds no money at any point, which means there is no float, no payout account to top up and nothing of yours sitting with us waiting to be released.
The integrations are free, unencoded and carry no licence check. An API key is the only thing connecting a shop to an account.
The shop plugins report an order twice, once from the order hook and once from the receipt page, and the two are reconciled at our end on a shared event identifier. A hook on its own misses the shopper who closes the tab; a receipt pixel on its own misses the order completed by a gateway callback later. Reporting is idempotent on the programme, the order reference and the event kind, so a gateway that calls back twice still produces one conversion. If Affiliatant is unreachable the plugin queues the event on your own server and retries, and checkout completes either way. The same care about idempotency and scoped keys applies to any API you expose.
Because the plugins carry no licence check and no encoded files, you can read what they do before installing them, which is the first thing worth checking in any shop extension.
There is one meter: attributed conversions a month. That is an order credited to one of your affiliates, counted once, in the month it happened. Clicks, visits, the number of affiliates you sign up and team members are not counted and do not affect the price.
The free band covers up to 20 attributed conversions a month with every feature included, and does not ask for a card. Paid bands start at £15.00 a month. There is no percentage of your sales, no percentage of affiliate commission, no percentage for moving money, no setup fee, no minimum term and no notice period. Stop at any time and the account returns to the free band. Every integration, including the REST API and webhooks, is on every band including the free one. The pricing page has the bands and what counts.
The how it works page follows a single sale from click to payment, and the integrations page covers what each plugin reports. If you are already running a programme somewhere else and want to know what moving it involves, get in touch and we will tell you.