Affiliate Management Software
Manage Affiliates Without a Manager
Approve partners, set each one's rate, message them, and pay them all in one batch. From one dashboard.
14-day free trial · No credit card required · Cancel anytime
Affiliate management software runs everything after the sale is tracked: recruiting affiliates, approving applications, grouping partners, setting commission rates, messaging, payouts and reporting. Referly does all of it for programs on Stripe, Shopify, WooCommerce, Paddle, Chargebee, Polar and Zylvie.
The job
Everything an affiliate manager does
Eight jobs make up affiliate program management. Here is who does each one.
Approving partners
An approvals queue with your own application form
- Spreadsheets
- An inbox and a rule you forget
- A hire
- Theirs, at their price
A rate per partner
Groups, milestones and per-affiliate rates
- Spreadsheets
- A column you forget to update
- A hire
- Theirs
Talking to partners
In-app chat, group chats and announcements
- Spreadsheets
- A BCC list
- A hire
- Theirs
Keeping them active
Leaderboards, contests and bonuses
- Spreadsheets
- Hope
- A hire
- If it is in scope
Paying partners
One batch through PayPal, Wise or Referly Payouts
- Spreadsheets
- Forty manual transfers
- A hire
- Baked into the retainer
Tax forms
W-9 and W-8 collected in the portal, from Business
- Spreadsheets
- A folder of emailed PDFs
- A hire
- Their problem, in theory
Knowing what worked
Four report tabs and CSV export
- Spreadsheets
- A pivot table
- A hire
- A monthly PDF
What it costs
A flat subscription, 0% of your sales
- Spreadsheets
- Your Sunday
- A hire
- A salary or a retainer
Do you need it
Three honest answers
Two of these are against our own interest. That is why you can trust the third.
Under 20 partners, one rate
A spreadsheet is fine
One rate and a monthly transfer run fit in a spreadsheet. Software earns its keep when you stop remembering who is on what rate.
More partners, more than one rate
This is what the software is for
Approvals, groups, per-partner rates, one payout batch and the tax forms, handled. The relationship work stays yours.
Recruiting is the bottleneck
You want software and a human
At that size, outreach and negotiation is a full job. Referly removes the admin around it. Many customers run both.
Recruiting
Affiliate recruitment, built in
Four ways to bring partners in, from a signup page on your domain to a marketplace of proven affiliates.
A signup page on your domain
Your own application questions, in five field types, with auto-approve when you want it.
Direct invitations
Invite by email with the group and rate pre-set, so partners land on the right deal.
Per-plan signup links
One link for creators, another for newsletters, each landing on its own rate.
Marketplace and Influencer Discovery
Add-on · $199/moCreators who joined Referly to find programs to promote, with real revenue and conversion numbers.
Every affiliate carries a source
Every affiliate carries the source they arrived from, so you know which channel brings partners who actually sell.
Influencer Discovery is a $199/mo add-on with 500 invitations a month, included on Enterprise and Agency Scale. Listing in the marketplace needs a separate licence.
Rates and tiers
Not every affiliate is worth 20%
Give a creator 30% and a newsletter 15%, then let milestones move partners up on their own.
Set a referral or revenue threshold, name the tier, give it an emoji. Affiliates watch themselves climb from inside their own portal.
- 🥉BronzeFrom day one20%
- 🥈Silver10 referrals25%
- 🏆Gold25 referrals or $10,000 revenue30%
- 💎Diamond100 referrals or $50,000 revenue35%
Each group carries its own commission plan, milestones, assets and signup link. On top: per-affiliate rates, per-product commissions, and rules that switch the rate on order amount, product or coupon.
Explore commission plans- Groups
- Each with its own plan, milestones and signup link
- Per-affiliate rates
- One partner, one number, overrides everything
- Per-product commissions
- A different rate where the margin differs
- Rule groups
- Switch the rate on order amount, product or coupon
- Milestones
- Automatic promotion on referrals or revenue
- Step-downs
- A high rate that drops after an agreed number of payments
Retention
Most affiliates go quiet after month one
Chat, announcements, leaderboards and contests keep them selling.
A partner signs up, sends two clicks, and disappears. Engage and Gamify are the two add-ons built to change that.
Explore messaging and announcementsEngage
Add-on · included on Enterprise and Agency Scale$67/mo
Chat with affiliates in-app, broadcast to a group, and send announcements with targeting and scheduling.
- Direct and group chat
- Broadcasts with assets attached
- Targeted popup announcements
- Audience targeting and scheduling
- Affiliate acquisition reports
Chat with your affiliates without leaving Referly. On Business this is limited to the account owner; invited team members need the Engage add-on to use Messages.
Gamify
Add-on · included on Enterprise and Agency Scale$67/mo
Leaderboards with public URLs, contests with real prizes, and bonuses that reward the behaviour you want.
- Leaderboards with public URLs
- Global or filtered ranking
- Contests with real prizes
- Daily to yearly winners
- Performance bonuses
On every plan, without an add-on
On every plan- 24 transactional email types
- A drag-and-drop email designer
- Per-notification toggles
- Open and click tracking
Reporting
See which partners are the program
Four report tabs, one honest answer.
The honest answer
Top 4 partners = 81% of affiliate revenue
Breakdowns by affiliate, country, device, referrer, UTM and landing page. An onboarding funnel shows where new affiliates stall, and everything exports to CSV.
Where new affiliates stall
Business and up- Page visits18,420
- First click4,106
- First referral612
- Signed up188
- Completed141
Revenue by affiliate, last 30 days
$16,295 total
- Maya Okonkwo$4,210
- Devon Reyes$3,880
- Priya Nair$2,940
- Sam Whitfield$2,115
- Lena Fischer$980
- Jonas Bergqvist$640
- Ada Nwosu$410
- Everyone else$1,120
Top 4 partners = 81% of affiliate revenue, $13,145 of $16,295
The tail is what software should absorb. The head is worth your time.
Your team
Give your team the program, not your password
Owner, admin and member roles, each scoped to the programs you choose.
A member runs the day-to-day on one program without seeing billing. Agencies add per-program permissions, white label and client billing on top.
| OwnerEverything | AdminAll programs | MemberOne program | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Approve and decline affiliates | |||
| Answer affiliate messages | |||
| Create commission plans and groups | – | ||
| Run payouts | – | ||
| See every program | – | ||
| Billing and plan changes | – | – | |
| Invite and remove team members | – | – |
Seats by plan
- Startup
- 1 seat
- Business
- 5 seats
- Enterprise
- Unlimited seats
- Agency
- Unlimited seats
The entry plan is a single seat. Check seat counts before you buy.
See how agencies run thisPayouts and paperwork
Pay 200 affiliates in one batch
Then let the platform handle the forms.
PayPal and Wise on the schedule you set, with holding periods and minimum thresholds. Or Referly Payouts: one charge to you, and every affiliate gets paid worldwide, no PayPal account needed.
PayPal
WiseReferly Payouts · 5% bank and ACH · 8% cardBank TransferW-9, W-8BEN and W-8BEN-E
Business and upFiled by the affiliate in the portal. Tax IDs encrypted at rest, W-8 expiry tracked.
EU self-billing invoices
Business and upGenerated per payout, with VAT numbers validated against the EU registry.
Automated payout batches
Business and upDaily, weekly or monthly, with holding periods and NET terms.
Manual payouts with proof
On every planMark as paid with a receipt attached, and unpay when a transfer bounces.
0% transaction fee on your sales, on every plan. Your own PayPal or Wise costs nothing on top. The Referly Payouts rail is opt-in and carries the fee above.
Explore payoutsCustomer stories
Take their word for it
The founders and affiliate managers behind three fast-growing programs, in their own words.
“Affiliates drive a serious share of our revenue across three countries. Since we moved to Referly everything runs from one place, tracking has been spot on, and our partners get paid without me chasing spreadsheets.”
Alexander Koppers
Affiliate Manager, Moov
$6.9M
in total affiliate-driven revenue
- 1,154
- active affiliates
- 19,017
- affiliate sales
- 1,240,030
- clicks tracked
“We have been running affiliate programs for over a decade, and ours is one of the biggest parts of how OptimizePress grows. Referly is the first platform where an operation with thousands of partners actually feels manageable, from recruiting new affiliates to tracking every sale they send.”
James Dyson
Founder & CEO, OptimizePress
- 7 figures
- in affiliate-driven sales
- 4,554
- active affiliates
- 10,536
- referrals
“This platform is quite simple and easy to use, and you can start attracting people to your affiliate program very quickly. A big plus is that the founder, Ayo, is super responsive.”
Ilfat Khayrullin
CMO & Co-founder, Letterly
- 300K+
- app users
- 689
- active affiliates
- 24,114
- clicks tracked
Pricing
One flat price. 0% of your sales.
Referly never takes a percentage of your revenue or your affiliates' commissions, on any plan.
FAQ
Before you hand a program to software
Two of these answers are against our own interest. That is deliberate.
14-day free trial · No credit card required · Cancel anytime
Affiliate management software handles the work around a program rather than the tracking inside it: recruiting and approving partners, grouping them, setting what each one earns, messaging them, paying them and reporting on what worked. Referly does all of that on top of its own tracking, so the partner, the rate and the payout live in one system.
Keep reading
Managing a program is one half of it. Tracking, and picking a tool, are the others.
- Affiliate tracking softwareHow links, coupon codes, renewals and refunds get attributed, and what happens at the edge of the cookie window.
- Referral program softwareThe customer-facing side: a widget in your product, two-sided rewards, and the fraud check that catches self-referrals.
- Best affiliate softwareFive tools compared on price, caps, fees and payment coverage, each with a stated limitation. Referly included.
- Referly vs the alternativesHead-to-head on caps, fees and what each tool gates.
- Running programs for clientsWhite label, per-program roles and client billing.
- How to recruit affiliatesThe part software cannot do for you, as a method.