Understanding the affiliate journey

The affiliate journey is the path a partner takes through your program: they sign up, get approved, receive a unique link and code, promote you to their audience, drive sales, and get paid a commission. Seeing the journey from the affiliate’s side helps you build a program worth promoting — a confusing sign-up, a stingy commission, or a slow payout each lose you partners at a different step.

This page describes the experience, not the setup. It shows what an affiliate sees and does at each stage, so the configuration in the feature docs has a clear purpose. To build the program itself, see Getting started with affiliates.

Two lanes, because the work splits cleanly — the promotion happens entirely on your partner’s side, while approving and paying happen on yours:

flowchart TB
    subgraph P["Your partner"]
        A1["Applies, or you add them"]
        A2["Gets a link and an optional coupon"]
        A3["Promotes to their own audience"]
        A5["Gets paid"]
    end
    subgraph S["You"]
        B1["Approve them into a campaign"]
        B2["Review the sale"]
        B3["Record the payout"]
    end
    A1 --> B1
    B1 --> A2
    A2 --> A3
    A3 -- "an order lands inside the cookie window" --> B2
    B2 --> B3
    B3 --> A5
    A5 -. "keeps promoting" .-> A3

The seven steps below expand each lane.

Who the affiliate is

An affiliate is an external partner — a creator, blogger, publisher, or any promoter with an audience. Unlike a referral, they need no prior order with you; they bring reach you could not get on your own. In return they expect a commission that makes promotion worth their effort and a payout they can rely on. The whole journey is pay-for-performance: they earn only on the orders they actually drive.

Step 1 — The affiliate applies or is invited

A partner enters your program one of two ways. They either self-register through your registration form — landing in your dashboard with a pending status — or you add them manually with their name and email. Either way, this first impression matters: a clean registration form and a clear value proposition decide whether good partners bother to apply. See Managing affiliates and the registration form.

Step 2 — You approve them

Before an affiliate can earn, they need approval and a campaign. The campaign sets their commission structure and the cookie window that governs attribution. You can review each application yourself or approve every registration on signup — that’s the Affiliate approval setting in affiliate settings. Approving the right partners, and steering different partners into different campaigns, keeps your program aligned with your margins. Commission options live in Affiliate campaigns and commissions.

Step 3 — The affiliate receives their link and code

Each approved affiliate gets a unique referral link and, optionally, a discount coupon to share. The link is how Bloop attributes orders to them; the coupon gives their audience a reason to buy now and gives the affiliate a clean asset to promote. From here the affiliate can log into their portal to grab their materials and watch their results.

Step 4 — The affiliate promotes you

The affiliate puts their link and code in front of their audience — in posts, videos, newsletters, bios, or reviews. This is the work you are paying for, and it happens entirely on the affiliate’s channels. A commission and offer worth talking about is what turns a signed-up affiliate into an active one.

Best practice

Activation, not recruitment, is the real bottleneck. A handful of partners who genuinely promote you beat a long list who signed up and went quiet. Give affiliates ready-to-use assets and a commission they can feel, then double down on the ones who actually post. See recruiting affiliates.

Step 5 — A customer buys and a sale is recorded

When someone clicks the affiliate’s link and completes a qualifying order within the cookie window, Bloop records a sale and calculates the commission from the affiliate’s campaign. The sale is created the moment the order is paid, or on fulfilment if that suits your lead times better — see order settings. It appears in your dashboard for review, and the affiliate sees the pending earning in their portal. Tracking and statuses are covered in Affiliate sales tracking.

An order that is cancelled, or not yet paid (cash on delivery or bank transfer, for example), creates no sale until it is paid, unless your order settings create sales on fulfilment. If the buyer’s email is the affiliate’s own, the sale is created as Pending with a self-referral note and is never approved automatically, so you decide whether it counts.

Step 6 — You approve the commission

You review each sale and approve the valid ones, rejecting anything that doesn’t hold up. Approving a sale moves its commission into the affiliate’s balance as money owed. Bloop handles the obvious cases for you: when an order is cancelled or fully refunded it revokes the commission automatically and shows the affiliate why, so the review step is yours for judgement calls rather than bookkeeping. A partial refund does not revoke the commission: while the sale is not yet paid out, Bloop recalculates it on the amount the customer kept. You can also skip the review entirely by approving orders immediately, but then a commission can reach a payout before the return window closes, and a paid commission is never revoked or recalculated.

Every commission moves through the same four states, and this is the map to reach for when a partner asks where theirs is.

stateDiagram-v2
    [*] --> Pending: order paid (or fulfilled) inside the cookie window
    Pending --> Approved: you approve it
    Pending --> Rejected: you reject it, or the order is cancelled or fully refunded
    Approved --> Rejected: the order is cancelled or fully refunded
    Approved --> Paid: included in a payout you record
    Rejected --> Pending: you mark it pending again
    Paid --> [*]
    note right of Paid: A paid commission is never revoked.<br/>A partial refund recalculates an unpaid one instead.

Step 7 — The affiliate gets paid

Approved commissions become available to pay out through the payment method the affiliate chose in their portal — until they’ve picked one, there’s nowhere to send the money and the payout is blocked. You make the transfer in your own bank or PayPal, then record it in Bloop, and the amount moves from the affiliate’s outstanding balance into their payment history. A reliable, on-time payout is the single biggest reason an affiliate keeps promoting you — and the reason they recommend your program to other partners. See Affiliate payouts.

How the journey shows up in your dashboard

Each step leaves data you can read: applications and approvals, clicks and sales, approved versus paid commission. Together they show where partners drop off — sign-ups that never produce a sale point to weak activation; sales that never get approved point to a review backlog. Use affiliate sales and payouts to keep the journey moving.

Where to go next

• Set the commission behind steps 2 and 5 in Affiliate campaigns and commissions.
• Shape steps 1 and 7 with managing affiliates and affiliate payouts.
• See the customer equivalent in The referral journey.