What Is Affilitrak?

Affilitrak is a Shopify app that tracks affiliate sales, calculates commissions and pays affiliates, and it costs nothing for the affiliates you recruit yourself.

That is the short answer, and on its own it describes about a third of what the app does.

The longer answer matters because of a problem almost every affiliate app leaves you holding.

Tracking was never the hard part of running an affiliate program.

Finding people to promote you is the hard part, and our data on 1,178 Shopify programs says most never get past it.

Getting content out of those people once they join is the second hard part.

Most affiliate software charges you a monthly fee to solve the easy problem and then leaves you alone with the two difficult ones.

Affilitrak is built the other way round: the tracking is free, and the two hard problems each have a product attached to them.

This page covers all of it, including the parts that will not suit you.

Introduction to Affilitrak

Affilitrak is affiliate marketing software for Shopify stores.

The app can be installed from the Shopify App Store and managed inside your Shopify admin.

It does three separate jobs, and most merchants only ever hear about the first.

1. It runs your affiliate program: affiliate tracking, commission rules, coupon codes, an affiliate dashboard and automated payouts.
2. It finds you affiliates: it has a marketplace where affiliates browse verified Shopify brands by category and apply to the programs that fit them.
3. It gets you content: with paid UGC gigs, where you brief creators, ship them a product and pay for a short UGC video you can then use in your own ads.

The first is what an affiliate app is.

The second and third are what a merchant actually needs and usually has to solve somewhere else, with a second tool and a second invoice.

With Affilitrak, you can use all of these on Shopify inside a single app.

Why finding affiliates is the part that matters

Most merchants get into affiliate marketing because they know it doesn't cost much to start, and the reward is decent for what is basically paying people a cut to sell your products.

Sales can come in faster, and you make more money in less time.

But merchants tend to get into this with zero skin in the game.

They think it's as simple as installing an app and waiting.

The affiliates you recruit are the most important part of making it all work.

And this is not a marketing claim.

It is what the data says, and it is the reason the Affilitrak marketplace exists at all.

We tracked the programs on Affilitrak and found that across those 1,178 programs, 61.3% have never generated a single referred sale.

Share of Shopify affiliate programs that have ever produced a referred sale

Program outcome	Share of programs
Never generated a referred sale	61.3%
Generated at least one	38.7%

Those programs are not broken.

They are empty, or close to it, because the merchant installed an app, set a commission rate and then discovered that nobody arrives on their own.

A second figure from the same data explains why volume alone does not rescue it: only around 16% of affiliates ever make a single sale, across 8,687 affiliates.

So a program needs a real flow of reasonably well-matched people, not a handful of sign-ups, and that is a recruiting problem rather than a software problem.

Everything below follows from that.

What Affilitrak costs

The pricing is unusual enough to state plainly and early, because it is the thing most likely to sound too good and therefore go unbelieved.

• Affiliates you recruit yourself: no fee, ever. No monthly subscription, no tiers, no cap on referral revenue, no card required to install.
• Affiliates who found you through the Affilitrak marketplace: 20% of the commission that affiliate earns.

What Affilitrak charges, by how the affiliate was sourced

Affiliate source	Affilitrak fee, as a share of the commission earned
Recruited by you	0%
Sourced through the marketplace	20%

Here is that second case in real numbers, so nobody has to work it out.

A $100 order from a marketplace-sourced affiliate on a 10% commission means the affiliate earns $10, Affilitrak takes $2, and you keep $88.

The fee is charged to you rather than deducted from the affiliate, so affiliates are paid the full rate they were promised in every case.

The logic is worth saying out loud: you pay only when the marketplace brings you somebody who actually earns, and everything you build yourself stays free.

The affiliate program: tracking, commissions and payouts

This is the core of the app, and the part that has to be right before anything else matters.

Tracking works on links, coupon codes, or both

A merchant can attribute a sale through a referral link, through a discount code typed at checkout, or through both, which matters because the two fail in different situations.

A link depends on a cookie that can be lost, while a code is written into the order itself and survives a cleared cookie, a switched device or a checkout on another domain.

Auto-apply coupon links combine the two

The affiliate shares one URL, Shopify applies the discount when it is clicked, and the visitor lands on your store with the code already on the order and the tracking parameter intact.

Nobody has to type anything at checkout, which is where code-based programs usually leak orders. We covered how it works in auto-apply discount links vs coupon codes.

Commission structures go well past a flat percentage

You can:

• Set a flat rate
• Build custom programs for different groups
• Reward top performers with performance ladders that raise the rate at defined thresholds
• Run multi-tier and MLM-style structures where affiliates earn from the people they bring in

Coupon codes can be issued or generated

You can create codes yourself for each affiliate, or let affiliates generate their own from templates you control, and switch that permission off when you would rather know exactly which codes exist.

Affiliates get a self-serve dashboard

With Affilitrak, you don't have to micro-manage affiliates.

They have their own dashboard where they can:

• Collect their own links and codes
• See their referred sales
• Watch their commissions accrue

That removes the steady trickle of "how am I doing" emails that otherwise lands on you.

Automatic payouts run on PayPal, but you can use other payment options

Automatic payments via PayPal can be set on a schedule, once a threshold is met.

You can also record payments made outside the app, and collect payment details from affiliates through a form, so the ledger stays accurate even when the money moved another way. The payouts setup guide walks through both.

Reporting sits inside Shopify admin

Referral performance, commissions and payout activity appear where the rest of your store data already lives, rather than in a separate tab you forget to open.

The marketplace: how you get affiliates

Every recruiting channel that works has the same shape: you make a list, you write a message, and you wait.

The Affilitrak marketplace runs the other way.

It is a directory of verified Shopify brands that affiliates browse by category.

They create a free account, get recommendations based on the niche they already work in, bookmark brands they are considering, and apply in one click.

Affiliates can also set an email alert for new brands opening applications in their category.

From your side (merchants), you list the program with your commission rate, what you sell and who it suits, and applications arrive without you sending anything.

There are currently ten categories:

• Apparel and Accessories
• Beauty and Personal Care
• Health and Wellness
• Home and Garden
• Food and Beverag
• Electronics
• Baby and Kids
• Gifts
• Fitness
• Digital Products

Two honest points about it.

• A marketplace affiliate starts colder than one you recruited: they have no existing relationship with your product, so treat the marketplace as volume at the top of the funnel and your own customers as the source of your best performers.
• Applications still need screening: inbound means more of them, not better ones, and the same approval judgement applies.

UGC gigs: how you get content

This is the newest part of Affilitrak and the part with no equivalent in most affiliate apps.

A UGC gig is a paid commission for a short video. You are not asking for a favour and you are not paying on performance, you are buying content outright, and the creator keeps the product either way.

Here is the whole flow, from the UGC terms.

1. You open a gig with the product, the brief, the payment and the shipping destination. Funds are loaded before a gig can open, so creators only ever see gigs that can actually pay them.
2. Creators apply by giving their follower count if it is a posting gig, and their shipping address.
3. You accept or decline within 14 days.
4. You ship the product, at no cost to the creator.
5. The creator delivers the video within 14 days of shipment. Every gig is one vertical video, 15 to 60 seconds, as an MP4 or MOV, showing what the brief asked for.
6. You approve it, or ask once for a revision and say what to change. A video left unreviewed for 72 hours is approved automatically, which protects the creator from a merchant who goes quiet.
7. For posting gigs, the creator posts it on their main account within 7 days of approval, labels it as an ad, and keeps it up for at least 30 days.
8. The creator is paid, in US dollars through PayPal: on approval for a video-only gig, or once the post link is on the gig page for a posting gig.

Two rules do most of the work in keeping this fair.

• The licence starts when the creator is paid: the creator lets you use the video in your ads and on your own channels, and that permission begins at payment rather than at submission.
• Posting gigs have a follower floor: creators need at least 1,000 followers on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook or YouTube, so a posting gig reaches an actual audience.

There is also a deliberate separation worth noticing: an approved affiliate of your brand cannot take that brand's gigs.

Commission and content stay as separate arrangements, so nobody ends up paid twice for the same relationship.

The reason this belongs in an affiliate app rather than in a separate tool is simple. The video you commission is the asset your affiliates have been asking you for, and the creators producing it are the pool your next affiliates come from.

The data underneath it

Most affiliate apps tell you what to do.

That's why we took a route most affiliate marketing apps on Shopify have not: publishing real data.

The statistics hub linked at the top of this page is built from first-party data across 1,178 programs and 8,687 affiliates, and it states the sample size on every figure. A few of the findings that shape the product:

• 93.1% of programs never change the 30-day attribution default, which means the most consequential setting in most programs was never actually decided.
• 10% is both the most common and the median realised commission rate, which is the benchmark your affiliates compare you against.
• Commission rate shows no meaningful relationship with program performance, at a correlation of -0.032 across 471 programs with at least three affiliates, so paying more is not the lever merchants assume it is.
• 46.5% of affiliates who ever sell make that first sale within seven days, which is why the first week of an affiliate relationship decides most of the outcome.

You can disagree with the conclusions, and the numbers are there to be checked.

How Affilitrak compares

The category splits into two pricing models, and the split matters more than any feature list.

• Subscription plus a percentage: UpPromote and Refersion both charge a monthly fee and then take a percentage on top as you grow, and Social Snowball sits at the premium end of the same model. Shopify Collabs is free to install and charges a commission processing fee on top.
• Flat subscription: BixGrow and GoAffPro charge a fixed monthly amount with no percentage attached, which becomes the better deal the larger your program gets.

Affilitrak is a third model.

There is no subscription at all, and the only money that changes hands is a share of commission on affiliates the marketplace brought you, which means the cost scales with value delivered rather than with your success.

Affilitrak holds a 5.0 rating from 266 Shopify App Store reviews, and is relatively new compared to some of the other affiliate marketing apps on Shopify.

I've talked to a bunch of merchants who switched from apps like UpPromote and BixGrow to Affilitrak, and their needs were the same.

They said they needed a simple affiliate marketing app that has the same useful features as the app they were coming from and is also free to use.

For the full side-by-side, see our comparison of the best affiliate apps for Shopify.

Who Affilitrak suits, and who it does not

An overview that only lists strengths is an advert, so here is the other half.

It fits you well if:

• You are starting an affiliate program and do not want a subscription before you have a single referred sale.
• Recruiting is your bottleneck, which by the data above it probably is.
• You want content as well as affiliates, and would rather not run a separate UGC platform.
• Your program is growing and a percentage-of-sales pricing model is starting to hurt.

Look elsewhere if:

• Your program is not on Shopify.

How to start

1. Install the app for free from the Shopify App Store.
2. Set the commission rate and the attribution window before you invite anyone, because both are difficult to change once affiliates have published links under the old rules. The settings guide covers both.
3. Issue links and codes, and decide whether affiliates may generate their own.
4. Invite your own customers first. Repeat buyers and reviewers are the highest-converting affiliates you will ever recruit, and you already have the list.
5. List on the marketplace so applications keep arriving while you do everything else.
6. Open a UGC gig when you need content your affiliates and your ads can both use.

Our guide to starting an affiliate program on Shopify covers the decisions in each of those steps properly.

We also think we have the best support team in the affiliate marketing category, because we respond as soon as we can to guide merchants through the app.

Frequently asked questions

Is Affilitrak really free?

Yes for every affiliate you recruit yourself, with no subscription and no cap on referral revenue. The one charge is 20% of the commission earned by affiliates the marketplace sent you.

How does Affilitrak track sales?

Through referral links, discount codes, or both at once. Codes are recorded on the order itself, so they survive the situations that destroy a cookie.

Do affiliates pay anything?

No. Affiliate accounts are free, and the marketplace fee is charged to the merchant rather than taken out of the affiliate's commission.

What is the difference between an affiliate and a UGC creator here?

An affiliate earns commission on sales they refer. A UGC creator is paid a set amount for a video you then own the right to use. An approved affiliate of your brand cannot take that brand's gigs.

How do payouts work?

Automatically through PayPal on a schedule once an affiliate passes your threshold, and you can record payments made outside the app so your records stay complete.

Can I move my existing affiliates over?

Yes, and support will help with the import rather than leaving you to rebuild the list manually.

Conclusion

Affiliate software has spent years competing on the part that was never difficult.

Tracking a referral is a solved problem, and charging a monthly fee for it while the merchant struggles alone to find anyone to promote them is the wrong way round.

So judge Affilitrak on the two hard things rather than the easy one: it gives you a place where affiliates come and find you, and a way to buy the content that makes them effective, with the tracking underneath it free for everyone you bring yourself.

You can install Affilitrak free and have links, codes and an affiliate dashboard running before you decide about anything else.