Where your join.store.fan referral link belongs on your own page
If part of your audience makes things too, your referral link has earned a slot. How the 25% to 50% ladder works and where to put it.
Look at who replies to your posts. If a decent share of them are people who also make something and sell it, you are already recommending tools to them. It happens in your comments, in your DMs, on calls, and in the answer you give for the fifth time this month when somebody asks what you use to take payments. The recommendation is happening either way. The only open question is whether it is written down anywhere, and whether you are paid for it.
The awkward part of recommending anything
Most creators are quietly uncomfortable with affiliate links, and for a decent reason. The internet is full of recommendations that exist because of the commission rather than the other way round, and everybody can smell it. Once your audience suspects that your advice is for sale, every other thing you say gets a small discount applied to it. That is a real cost and it is not recoverable.
The genuinely hard part is that there is no clever wording that fixes this. You cannot disclose your way out of recommending something you do not use. The only version that survives contact with an audience is the boring one: you sell your own things through the thing you are recommending, you can describe what it does badly as well as what it does well, and the link is available for people who were going to ask anyway. If that is not true of you yet, skip this article and come back in six months.
The second hard part is placement. Your storefront exists to sell your work. Every card you add pushes something else down, and a referral link is not your work. So the question is not whether the link can go on the page. It is which slot it deserves, and the honest answer for most creators is one near the bottom.
How the terms compare with the shape most schemes take
Referral schemes vary enormously, and the differences that matter are rarely the headline percentage. They are the window, the payout timing and who holds the money in between. Here is how the store.fan programme is put together, next to the pattern you will recognise from a lot of software referral schemes.
| The pattern you usually meet | The store.fan programme |
|---|---|
| A fixed percentage, the same for everyone forever | A ladder from 25% to 50%, set by how many of your referrals paid in the last 30 days |
| Paid on the first payment only | Paid across each referral's first 12 months |
| Money held until a monthly payout run, sometimes with a minimum threshold | Transferred to your Stripe account when the referral's payment clears |
| Payouts to a platform wallet you then withdraw from | Straight into the same Stripe account you already use for your own sales |
| A long tracking link that looks like spam in a bio | join.store.fan/yourcode, short enough to say out loud on a podcast |
| Tracking that only works on one landing page | ?ref= works across store.fan marketing pages, so any of them can be the entry point |
Putting the link where it does not get in the way
Your storefront gives you unlimited link cards on every plan, including Free, which means the referral link costs you nothing except attention. Attention is the expensive part, so spend it deliberately.
A placement that respects your buyers
0/7A worked example over a year
Say you mention the link in a podcast episode and three listeners start on a paid plan that month. Because the commission covers each referral's first 12 months, those three are not a one-off entry in your ledger. They are a small amount arriving each month for a year, landing in your Stripe account as each of their payments clears, alongside your own sales. Two of them cancel in month five. The third stays the year. That is what this looks like in reality: some fall away, one or two do not, and the arithmetic only works if you keep talking to people who were going to build something anyway.
The compounding, such as it is, comes from the 30-day window rather than from volume. A month where several referrals pay can lift you up the ladder, and the ladder applies to what you earn while you are on it. This is why a steady trickle of genuinely suited referrals beats one enormous push followed by silence. It is also why the link belongs in evergreen places, such as your storefront and your podcast notes, rather than in a single post that is invisible by Thursday.
You need an account before you have a referral code, and the free plan gives you the page, the link cards and the code without a card.
Get your referral codeThe mistake most people make with a referral link
The usual error is pinning it to the top of the page. It feels like the highest-value slot, and it is, which is precisely the problem: the top slot belongs to the thing your visitors came for. Ninety-something per cent of the people tapping your bio link are not going to start a storefront this week. They came for the sample pack, the booking or the guide, and the first thing they meet should be that. The second error is subtler and worse. It is recommending a tool you do not actually run your own business on, because the terms looked good. Your audience finds out, usually at the moment they need help with it and you cannot give any.
Yes. The shorter join.store.fan/yourcode format is the current one and is easier to say aloud, but existing store.fan/a/ links continue to work, so anything you have already printed or recorded is fine.
It works across store.fan marketing pages, which means you can point people at whichever page fits your conversation, such as pricing or features, rather than always sending them to the same door.
It transfers to your own Stripe account the moment the referral's payment clears. There is no separate wallet to withdraw from, because it lands in the same account your own sales already go to.
Mostly no, and it is better to be honest about that. If almost nobody in your audience wants to sell something, the card takes up space and earns nothing. Spend that slot on a lead magnet or a second product instead.
A referral link is a small, honest line of income that only works when the recommendation was already true. If you sell your own work through your storefront, if you can name the things it does not do, and if the people asking you about it are genuinely trying to build something, then the link belongs on the page. Put it low, label it for the right reader, and let it sit there. If you want to check the terms before you use it, they are on the pricing page and in the FAQ, and the underlying feature list is the thing you should be able to describe from memory before you recommend it to anybody.
Set your own storefront up first, sell something through it, and the recommendation writes itself.
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