Affiliate Programs
Your best marketers are often your members. Affiliate programs let you pick members, give each one a link, and record a commission whenever someone they send buys a plan or product. You pay them yourself — by PayPal or however you like — and mark it as paid in your dashboard.
Setting it up
- Open Affiliates → Settings and turn the program on.
- Choose a hold period — how many days a new commission waits before you owe it (30 by default, 0 to 90). This gives refunds time to come through first.
- Set a default commission. It pre-fills the commission card on each plan and product.
- On each paid plan and product, open the Affiliate commission card and choose:
- a percent of each payment, or a flat amount per sale
- a cookie window — how many days after the click a purchase still counts
- for plans only: pay on the first payment only or on every payment
- Go to the Affiliates tab, click Add affiliate and pick a member. They get an email with their link straight away.
Any member can be an affiliate, including free members. You can also turn someone on from their member profile.
What affiliates see
Each affiliate gets a hub on your member site, under Account → Affiliate program. From there they can:
- copy their link, which works on every page of your site
- build links straight to a plan, product or course page, with the commission shown next to each
- see their clicks, sales and what is pending, owed and paid
- add the PayPal email you should pay them at
- turn off the “you earned a commission” email
How tracking works
When someone opens an affiliate link, Indie Member remembers the affiliate in a cookie on your site and sends the visitor on to the same page. If they buy within that offering’s cookie window, the sale is credited. The newest link wins: if they click another affiliate’s link first, that affiliate gets the sale.
Tracking runs on our server, so ad blockers do not stop it. It does not follow people between devices — a click on a phone and a purchase on a laptop are not linked.
Commissions are recorded only when money is actually collected. A free trial earns nothing until the first paid invoice, and a 100% coupon earns nothing at all.
Pending, owed and paid
- Pending — inside the hold period.
- Owed — past the hold period, ready to pay.
- Paid — included in a payout you marked as sent.
- Voided — cancelled by a full refund, or by you.
To pay someone, click Mark as paid on their row. Owed commissions are selected for you. Add the date, the method and a note (a PayPal transaction ID works well), and choose whether to email them. Marked one by mistake? Delete the payout from the Payouts tab and the commissions go back to owed.
To pay many affiliates at once, use Export CSV on the Affiliates tab. It lists each affiliate’s PayPal email and what you owe them, ready to turn into a PayPal Payouts file.
Refunds
Refunds adjust commissions automatically:
- A full refund voids an unpaid commission.
- A partial refund reduces it by the same share.
- If you already paid it, a negative adjustment is added and comes off the affiliate’s next payout.
What does not earn a commission
- Your own purchases
- Free plans and access you give away
- ThriveCart and other outside purchases
- An affiliate buying through their own link
- Anything that cost $0
Changing a plan’s or product’s commission only affects new referrals. Sales already credited keep the terms they started with.
Privacy
Affiliate links set one first-party cookie, im_ref, on your member site. It lasts up to a year and holds only the affiliate’s code and the click time. If you have visitors in the EU or UK, mention it in your privacy policy as a referral-tracking cookie.