Getting started

What AffiliateRail is, how the pieces fit together, and the fastest route to a working program.

An affiliate program here is four things:

A tracking script on your site. It remembers who sent each visitor.
A payment connection to Stripe or Paddle. It tells us when those visitors pay.
Commission rules. They decide what each sale earns.
A partner portal. Your affiliates get their links there and watch their results.

You can set up all four in one sitting. Do it by hand, or ask your AI agent to do it.

Getting started in the dashboard walks the same steps and checks each one live. These pages are the longer version, to read ahead or come back to.

What the checklist proves

The checklist checks the visitor side and the payment side separately:

Click received means a click from your site reached us.
Test sale attributed means a test payment found the right customer and partner. It also made a commission.

The payment step follows the processor your program uses. It names Stripe Connect, the Stripe App or Paddle, and shows whether that connection is verified. A Paddle connection that isn't verified stays selected and points you back to its details. The checklist never asks you to connect a second processor.

Let your agent set it up

Connect Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code or Codex. Say "set up my affiliate program" and it works through every step with you.

Quickstart

Connect Stripe in test mode, add the tag, and watch a test sale get credited. On Paddle? The Paddle guide covers the payment step.

Concepts

The objects behind everything: partners, referrals, sales, commissions and payouts. And how money moves between them.

Authentication

API keys, scopes, live and test mode. And how AI agents connect over MCP without a key.

What makes it different

Four decisions shape everything else.

Payouts are non-custodial. That means we never hold the money. Your PayPal or Wise account pays your partners directly. We work out who's owed what and tell your account to pay. The money never passes through us, and we charge nothing on it. Your partners never do ID checks with us either, because we never hold their money.
One rule can hold many branches. A commission rule is an ordered list of branches. Each branch is a condition and a rate. A three-tier ladder is one rule. So is a monthly-versus-yearly split, or a first-year-only deal.
Stripe test mode works fully, and never pays anyone. Test mode is Stripe's practice mode, with fake cards and fake money. Connect a test-mode account and the whole loop runs: clicks, attribution, sales and commissions. You can prove your setup before a real customer pays. A test sale is marked as one everywhere it shows. It never adds to a partner's balance or enters a payout. It never counts in your revenue or in what you owe.
Everything explains itself. Every commission records which rule and branch set it. Every sale we couldn't credit says what was missing. Every payout that can't go out carries its reason. When a partner asks "why", the answer is one click away.