Affiliate commission: when it actually reaches your Stripe account
Commission transfers to your Stripe the moment a referral's payment clears, and runs for their first twelve months. Here is how to track it.
Someone clicked your link three weeks ago. You know because you watched the referral appear, and you have been checking your Stripe account most mornings since, wondering whether you imagined the whole thing. Nothing has gone wrong. There is a sequence between a click and a transfer, and every stage of it has a reason. Once you know the shape of it, you can stop refreshing.
The gap between a click and a transfer
A referral link is not a payment. Somebody follows join.store.fan/yourcode, has a look, and signs up. If they take a paid plan they start on a 14-day free trial, because that is how paid plans begin for everyone. During those two weeks there is no payment, so there is no cleared payment, so there is nothing to pay commission on. That is the fortnight where most affiliates decide the tracking is broken.
When the trial converts and their first payment clears, your share is transferred to your Stripe account at that moment. Not at the end of the month, not once you cross a threshold, and not after a holding period invented for the platform's convenience. It goes to your own account, which is the same arrangement as everything else here: money moves directly, and 0% is taken as a platform cut. The affiliate feature page lays out the mechanics, and the terms are worth reading once properly.
The honestly hard part is that none of this is under your control. Somebody can love your recommendation, sign up the same evening, and then not convert their trial for reasons that have nothing to do with you. Commission follows cleared payments, so a referral who never pays is a referral who never pays, however enthusiastic they were on the day. Affiliates who plan around signups rather than around payments are always disappointed by the arithmetic.
Two ways to run a referral
The comparison worth making is not with another programme. It is with the way most people run affiliate income: by vibes, checking a dashboard occasionally and hoping.
| Running it on hope | Running it on a ledger |
|---|---|
| Counting clicks and feeling good about them | Counting cleared first payments, because that is what pays |
| Waiting for a monthly payout that never announces itself | Money transferred to your Stripe as each payment clears |
| No idea when a referral's commission ends | A twelve-month clock recorded per person from their first cleared payment |
| Rate treated as a fixed number attached to your name | Rate understood as 25% to 50%, moving with the last 30 days |
| One link posted once and forgotten | join.store.fan/yourcode in the places people actually read, plus ?ref= on marketing pages |
| A platform fee assumed to be lurking somewhere | 0% platform fee on every plan, on both sides of the referral |
Building a referral ledger you will actually keep
Seven lines in a spreadsheet, once a month
0/7A worked timeline
You mention store.fan in a newsletter on the 3rd. A reader signs up on the 5th, starts a 14-day trial, and converts on the 19th. Their first payment clears that day, and your commission is transferred to your Stripe account then, at whatever rate your last 30 days put you on. Their twelve-month window now runs to the 19th of the same month next year.
A second reader signs up on the 20th, converts on the 4th of the following month, and starts their own twelve months from that date. If you refer nobody else, your rate will drift back down the ladder while both of those referrals carry on paying you every month at whatever band applied when each payment cleared. That is the useful mental model: the rate is about your recent activity, the twelve months are about each person, and the transfers are about their payments clearing. Three separate clocks, none of which needs watching daily. The ladder explainer covers the first of them in more detail.
You need an account of your own before you can refer anyone to one.
Get your linkThe mistake most people make
The usual error is recommending store.fan to an audience that has nothing to sell. Commission follows cleared payments, and payments follow people who genuinely needed a storefront, so a hundred casual signups from a general audience will earn less than five people who were already trying to sell a workbook. Point people at something concrete: the plan comparison if they are weighing it up, or the feature overview if they do not yet know what it does. The second error is treating the link as the work. A link posted with no explanation of what problem it solves converts about as well as any other link posted with no explanation.
It is transferred to your Stripe account the moment the referral's payment clears. There is no monthly cycle to wait for and no minimum threshold to reach first.
Almost always because they are inside the 14-day free trial that starts every paid plan. Nothing has cleared yet, so there is nothing to transfer. Commission appears when their first payment goes through.
You earn for each referral's first twelve months. After that their account continues and your commission on it stops. The window is counted per referral, so different people expire at different times.
Yes. Older links still work, and the shorter join.store.fan/yourcode form is the one to use going forward. On store.fan marketing pages, a ?ref= parameter does the same job.
Referral income is not mysterious, it is just delayed by exactly one trial period and then paid on the same rhythm as somebody else's subscription. Write down the dates once and you will never have to guess what is owed.
Open a store, get your join link, and recommend something you actually use.
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