What is Simple Affiliate?
Simple Affiliate is a Shopify-native affiliate marketing app that lets you run an in-house affiliate or referral program from your own store. Affiliates sign in with your store’s Shopify customer accounts, share referral links or discount codes, and earn commission on orders attributed to them.
The program stays connected to your Shopify store and customer experience instead of sending affiliates to a separate third-party network. This gives you one place to manage affiliate access, referral tracking, commissions, and customer support expectations.
How Simple Affiliate works
- Affiliate access: Affiliates use your store’s Shopify customer accounts to sign in.
- Affiliate dashboard: New customer accounts use the Shopify customer-account area. Classic customer accounts use a branded dashboard page on your theme, such as
/pages/simple-affiliate. - Referral links: Affiliates can share links containing a tracking code such as
sacode. Optional UTM parameters can provide additional campaign context. - Discount codes: Where configured, unique discount codes can identify referred orders.
- Customer connection: On the Pro plan, a customer can remain connected to the referring affiliate after the customer’s first referred purchase when that feature is enabled.
What you manage as the merchant
You decide how to structure the program, including the affiliates and groups you use, the referral methods available to affiliates, and the commission rules supported by your plan. Simple Affiliate records referral activity against the available tracking information; it does not replace your responsibility to define commission terms or explain them to affiliates.
Affiliates receive the full commission assigned to an attributed order. If you use Autopay, any applicable processing fee is paid by you on top of the commission rather than deducted from the affiliate’s commission.
What to tell your customers and affiliates
Set the expectation that attribution depends on the referral method being used and the order meeting your configured program rules. Customers should follow the affiliate’s referral link or use the affiliate’s unique discount code as instructed. Affiliates can then review their activity and available information through the affiliate dashboard on your store’s customer-account experience.