You can. Here's what you're signing up for.
Sounds simple. Then you need rate limiting, bot filtering, IPv6 packing, X-Forwarded-For chain parsing, attribution-cookie scoping for subdomains, and a way to never double-count the same click from a retry. Two weeks if you're lucky.
Your checkout retries. Stripe's webhook retries. Affiliates submit refunds 30 days later. Your dedup key has to survive all three. Without dedup you pay out the same conversion twice.
Two affiliates link the same visitor. Visitor buys. Who gets paid? The one with the most recent click within the program's window — and you'd better have an index on (visitor_token, occurred_at) or every conversion does a table scan.
Affiliates want to see clicks, conversions, earnings, payout status. You'll build it three times before they're satisfied. We've already built it twice.
Approving conversions, batching them, kicking off transfers, reconciling failed payouts, surfacing the failure to the affiliate so they update their account. Six weeks. Minimum.
1099-K thresholds, W-9 collection, GDPR-compliant cookie disclosure, the affiliate terms-of-service that protects you when one of them spam-blasts your URL. None of this ships product.
Cookie stuffers, self-referrers, velocity bots, duplicate-order resubmissions. The patterns mutate constantly. Real-time scanning + a reviewer UI that explains why each flag fired is a six-month engineering effort on its own — assuming you have the data to learn from.
Sign up, create a program, share your tracking link. We handle the rest.
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