What actually belongs in your affiliate terms
Six clauses that prevent the arguments, and the two most creators forget until the first one happens.
Nobody opens an affiliate program excited about the terms. But every unpleasant moment in one of these relationships traces back to something that was never written down — usually the day someone's commission got reversed, or the day you saw your name in a paid search ad you didn't authorise.
The six that earn their place
- 1How the commission is calculated. A percentage of what: the item price, after discounts, excluding delivery and tax. Ambiguity here is the single most common dispute.
- 2When it's earned. Provisional until the refund window closes, reversed proportionally if the money goes back. Say it before it happens, not after.
- 3How attribution works. The window in days, last click wins, and the honest note that browser-based tracking can lose a sale.
- 4What's prohibited. Self-referral, coupon and cashback sites, bidding on your brand name, unsolicited email, and any claim you don't make yourself.
- 5Disclosure. Affiliates must disclose that their links are affiliate links, as the FTC guides and equivalent local rules require.
- 6Ending it. Either side can stop at any time; earned, non-refunded commissions survive.
The two most people forget
The first is claims. An affiliate saying your course guarantees a job, or your supplement fixes a condition, creates a problem that lands on you as the seller of record. Write down that they may not make claims you don't make yourself — and then check your own page, because that's the ceiling you just set.
The second is brand bidding. Someone buying ads on your own name is intercepting people who were already coming to you and charging you a commission for it. It looks like performance and it's a tax. One sentence prevents it.
Where the platform ends and you begin
On store.fan both the creator and the affiliate accept the Creator Affiliate Program Terms — the version, timestamp and a client fingerprint are recorded, so there's a record of what each person agreed to. That covers the mechanism: how commissions are calculated, when they reverse, what data affiliates can and cannot see.
Your house rules are the layer on top: the specifics of your niche, your brand, and what you don't want your name attached to. Keep them short enough that people read them.
For a small program, plain honest rules on your program page plus the platform terms are usually proportionate. If you operate at scale, in a regulated niche, or across jurisdictions with different advertising rules, take advice.
Prospectively, yes — changes apply going forward. What you cannot do is retroactively reduce a commission somebody already earned.
End their participation. Their link stops earning immediately; commissions already earned on completed, non-refunded sales still belong to them.
Open a program where both sides accept the terms before anyone earns anything.
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