Setting up an affiliate program on Refersion means connecting your ecommerce store, building a commission offer, and choosing a payout method before you ever recruit an affiliate. If you run a Shopify, WooCommerce, or BigCommerce store, you can have Refersion tracking live in under an hour. This guide walks through every step, plus where Refersion starts to run out of room once your program grows.
I get some version of this question every week from ecommerce owners: “Should I use whatever affiliate app my platform recommends?” Refersion is usually the app in question, and for good reason. It’s a Shopify Plus Certified Partner with hundreds of five-star reviews in the app store, and it does one thing well: connect a purchase to the person who sent it.
That said, “does one thing well” is also the honest limit of the platform, and you’ll want to know that going in. Let’s get you set up, then talk about where the ceiling is.
What is Refersion, and who is it built for?
Refersion is affiliate tracking and payout software built specifically for online stores. It plugs directly into Shopify, Shopify Plus, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Adobe Commerce, and it hands you a working affiliate link, a cookie window, and a commission record the moment someone buys through an affiliate’s link.
The fit is narrow and clear. If you sell physical or digital products through one of those platforms and want to launch an affiliate program without hiring a developer, Refersion is built for exactly that. If you’re running a service business, a course on a platform without native ecommerce, or a SaaS product billed on recurring subscriptions, you’re better off with software built for that model instead. My own two-tier affiliate program breakdown covers a few of those alternatives if that’s you.
If you’re on WooCommerce specifically, the setup differs enough from Shopify that I wrote a separate walkthrough for it. Check out how affiliate programs work on WooCommerce before you connect your store.
If Shopify is your platform, the setup steps below cover the basics, but I go deeper on Shopify-specific decisions like app selection and cookie duration in How To Set Up An Affiliate Program On Shopify. Worth a read alongside this one.
How do you set up Refersion and connect it to your store?
The connection process is fast if you’re on Shopify. Here’s the actual sequence:
Open a Refersion account, or if you already have one, go to Profile Name, then Settings, then the Tracking tab, and click “+Add Tracking.” Select Shopify from the platform list, enter your myshopify.com URL, and click Continue. Shopify will take you to its app installation screen, where you click Install, select a plan, and click Approve Charge. That’s it. Refersion drops you into its Quick Start Guide from there.
For a standard Shopify or Shopify Plus store, that whole sequence takes 10 to 15 minutes. WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Adobe Commerce work through similar plugin-based connections. If you’re on a headless or custom-built store, plan for closer to a week, since you’ll be working through Refersion’s API documentation instead of a one-click install.
Before you tell a single affiliate you’re open for business, run a test order. Refersion has a built-in feature for this exact purpose, and it’s the difference between finding a broken tracking link yourself versus your first affiliate finding it for you. I’ve seen programs lose their best early affiliate’s trust over a $40 commission that never tracked. Don’t skip this step.
How do you configure commissions and get affiliates registered on Refersion?
Commissions in Refersion are called “offers,” and you build them under Affiliates, then My Offers. You define the commission parameters there: flat percentage, flat dollar amount, or, if you’re on the Growth plan or higher, product-level rates so different SKUs pay differently.
That product-level option matters more than it sounds. Say you sell a $150 product with healthy margin and a $40 accessory with almost none. A flat 20 percent commission works fine on the first and eats your profit on the second. Product-level offers let you set, say, 20 percent on the flagship item and 8 percent on the accessory, so your affiliates still get paid fairly without you subsidizing every sale. If you’re unsure what range to start at, my post on what counts as a good affiliate commission rate walks through the math by industry.
For registration, Refersion gives you a hosted signup page you can customize on the Growth tier and up, or a basic default form on Launch. Either way, this is also the point where you should nail down your terms and conditions before your first affiliate signs up, not after. Vague commission terms are one of the most common sources of affiliate disputes I see, and it’s a fixable problem if you handle it now instead of during a payout argument three months in.
Most business owners either skip terms entirely or pay a lawyer $500 or more to draft something generic. If you want something built specifically for affiliate programs in minutes instead of hours, the Affiliate Terms Wizard is trained on over 1,000 attorney-written agreements and gets you a real document before your first affiliate application lands.
Once your offer and terms are live, build a registration page that converts lookers into applicants. That’s a different skill from setting the commission rate, and I cover it in how to create an affiliate program page that actually recruits affiliates.
How do affiliates get paid through Refersion?
You’ve got five real options, and which one you pick depends on where your affiliates live and how hands-off you want payouts to be.
Unified Payments is the most automated route, but it’s US-only and USD-only. Funds pull from your linked bank account on the 2nd of each month and go out to affiliates on the 10th, with no manual action needed on your end once it’s set up. PayPal Payouts costs a flat 25 cents per bulk payment and works well if most of your affiliates already have PayPal. Trolley handles bank transfer or PayPal for international affiliates and stores their tax documentation for you, which matters the moment you have even one affiliate outside the US.
If you’d rather stay manual, you can send a gift card by email through Refersion, or pay someone by check, wire, or Venmo outside the platform and mark them as paid so your records stay accurate. None of these require advance setup, which makes them a fine starting point while you’re still deciding on a permanent method.
Whichever method you pick, the schedule matters as much as the mechanism. I break down the payout timing mistakes that cost programs their best affiliates in How to Pay Affiliates: Payout Schedules, Methods, and What Not to Get Wrong.
Where is Refersion strong, and where does it fall short?
Refersion earns its reputation on speed and reliability for standard ecommerce setups. The Shopify integration is painless, commission and campaign management are solid, and users consistently rate those two features as the platform’s strongest points. If your entire goal is “track sales, calculate commissions, pay people,” it delivers.
Where it thins out is everywhere past that core loop. Reporting leans functional rather than deep, so if you want real cohort analysis or affiliate-level lifetime value tracking, you’ll be exporting data and building your own view of it. Recruiting tools amount to a basic public marketplace listing, not an actual sourcing engine, which means you’re still doing the outreach work yourself. My post on recruiting affiliates from your existing customer base covers a recruiting channel Refersion won’t do for you.
Then there’s the pricing structure, which is worth understanding before you commit. Refersion’s Launch plan runs $39 a month plus 3 percent of affiliate-driven sales. Growth runs $129 a month (or $103 billed annually) plus 2 percent. Scale starts around $599 a month, or $479 annually, plus 1 percent, dropping to 0 percent on annual Scale plans for stores under $1 million in yearly gross merchandise value. That percentage-of-sales fee functions like a second commission on every affiliate sale, on top of what you’re already paying your affiliate. It’s manageable at low volume and adds up fast once your affiliate channel starts working, which is a strange thing for affiliate software to punish you for.
When does a different platform serve you better?
Refersion makes sense for as long as three things stay true: you’re on a supported ecommerce platform, your program is small enough that the percentage fee doesn’t sting, and you don’t need deep reporting or real recruiting help.
Once any of those stop being true, it’s worth looking elsewhere. If you’ve scaled past the point where 1 to 3 percent of affiliate revenue is real money walking out the door every month, a flat-fee platform starts paying for itself. If you need recruiting tools that do more than list you in a directory, or reporting that answers questions instead of logging transactions, you’ll outgrow what Refersion offers. My guide to choosing affiliate program software lays out the fuller comparison across platforms if you’re at that decision point.
Full disclosure: I built AffiliateHQ, so weigh this next part accordingly. I built it after running affiliate programs at every scale for over 20 years, because every piece of software I tried made me choose between “easy to set up” and “built for running a program day to day.” Every feature in AffiliateHQ maps to something I teach in The Book on Affiliate Management and have practiced for two decades managing programs that generated over a billion dollars in affiliate sales combined.
If you’ve hit the ceiling on tracking, recruiting, or reporting, take a look at AffiliateHQ, software built by someone who’s run programs for a living, not engineered as a checkout add-on.
Conclusion: what to configure first
Start in this order. Connect your store under Settings, then Tracking, then Add Tracking. Build your commission offer under Affiliates, then My Offers, with product-level rates if your margins vary. Lock in your terms and payment method before you open registration, not after your first application shows up.
Give it 90 days once you’re live. If tracking and payouts feel solid but recruiting and reporting feel thin, that’s not a setup mistake. That’s Refersion doing exactly what it’s built to do, and it’s your signal to start evaluating what comes next. My step-by-step affiliate program launch guide covers the recruiting push that comes right after this setup, regardless of which platform you land on.
Not sure whether Refersion fits your program or you’ve already outgrown it? Book a free 20-minute call through Your Affiliate Launch Coach and I’ll help you map out the next 30 to 60 days.
