Most affiliate setups require you to bolt a third-party tool onto your payment processor, wrangle a webhook integration, and maintain two separate billing systems every time you update your pricing. Creem eliminates all of that. Because Creem is your Merchant of Record — meaning it already processes every sale, handles tax compliance, and records every transaction — adding an affiliate program is a configuration step, not an engineering project.
The result is attribution that never breaks (because the tracking is inside the same system that records the sale), payouts that actually move money to partners internationally, and a dashboard that shows you exactly which affiliates are driving revenue. This guide walks through the entire setup from scratch.
How Creem's Affiliate Platform Is Structured
Your affiliates never touch your Creem dashboard. They get a purpose-built portal under a separate subdomain, with their own login. This matters because it means you never have to manage permissions, roles, or the awkward moment where a partner accidentally sees your revenue numbers.
Step 1 — Create Your Affiliate Program
In your Creem dashboard, navigate to Growth → Affiliate Hub in the left sidebar. If this is your first program, you'll land on the creation wizard. If you've been here before, click New Program.
Fill in the four fields that define your program:
1 Program Name. What your affiliates will see when they join. Use your product name — something they'll recognise, not an internal codename.
2 Website URL. Where referral links send visitors. This should be your public-facing landing page or homepage — not your app login, not your dashboard. This is the most common setup mistake and it kills your conversion rate before it has a chance to breathe.
3 Program Slug. The URL identifier appended to every affiliate link. If your slug is my-saas, referral links read as yoursite.com?ref=my-saas-[partnercode]. Keep it lowercase, hyphen-separated, no special characters.
4 Commission Rate. The percentage of each sale paid to the affiliate. For SaaS products, the range that meaningfully motivates promotion is typically 20–40%. Below 10% is rarely worth an affiliate's effort. Above 50% works only if your margins support it.
Once you save, your Affiliate Hub dashboard appears. The program is live, the commission structure is set, and Creem is ready to track referrals. Nothing to integrate, nothing to configure externally.
Step 2 — Invite Your First Affiliates
From the Affiliate Hub, click Invite Partner. A modal appears asking for two things: your partner's name and email address. Enter both and click Send Invite.
Creem sends your partner an email with a join link. In your Partners list, they immediately appear with an Invited status badge. Once they accept, their badge flips to Active and they appear in your analytics.
By default, programs are invite-only. Anyone you haven't explicitly invited cannot join. If you want an open program where potential partners can self-enroll, toggle Public Program in your program settings. For most SaaS founders, invite-only is the right default — it keeps your affiliate roster deliberate and manageable.
Step 3 — Configure Per-Affiliate Settings
Click any affiliate in your Partners list to open their detail panel. This is where Creem's affiliate management goes from simple to genuinely powerful.
*Custom commission rates
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Every affiliate inherits your program's default commission rate — but you can override it per-partner. A newsletter writer with 50,000 subscribers who drives consistent volume deserves a different rate than a new partner you're still evaluating. You can set individual rates anywhere from 0 to 95%, independent of the program default, without affecting anyone else.
*Product restrictions
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If you sell multiple products, you can restrict which ones a given affiliate is authorised to promote. Leave this blank and they can link to anything. Specify products and only those links earn commission. This is essential if you have a flagship product you want to protect from off-brand promotion, or a legacy product you'd prefer not to amplify.
Step 4 — What Your Affiliates See
When a partner accepts their invitation, they land at affiliates.creem.io and sign in with Google or a magic link — using the same email you invited. First-time users complete a brief profile: display name, bio, website, and optional social links. This is what you see when reviewing partners, so encourage them to fill it out properly. A blank profile is a lost first impression.
Their dashboard surface three things immediately:
1 Referral link. Their unique URL, one-click to copy, displayed at the top of the dashboard. This is what they share everywhere.
2 Performance metrics. Revenue, customers referred, total clicks, and conversion rate — all updating in real time as sales happen.
3 30-day earnings chart. A visual breakdown of commission earned each day. This is the chart that turns passive affiliates into active ones — seeing a spike after a promotion is motivating in a way that a static number is not.
How tracking works
When a visitor clicks an affiliate's referral link, Creem sets a tracking cookie in their browser. Any purchase completed within the cookie duration window is automatically attributed to that affiliate and logged against their commission balance. No manual step is required on either side.
*Creating affiliate-specific discount codes
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In your Creem dashboard, navigate to Products → Discount Codes and create a new code. Name it after your affiliate — their handle or brand makes it memorable and self-attributing. Set your discount amount, activate the code, and share it alongside their referral link. You now have two independent signals tracking the same customer. Belt and suspenders.
Step 5 — Track Performance in the Affiliate Hub
Your Affiliate Hub is the control room. At the top, six headline metrics give you an instant program health check:
Step 6 — Understand the Payout Flow
Affiliates request payouts from the Balance page inside their portal. Three balance states are shown:
Before an affiliate can request their first payout, two things must happen. First, they complete identity verification (KYC) through Sumsub — a government-issued ID and selfie, typically approved within 24 hours. Second, they add a payout method: bank transfer via Paysway, or USDC cryptocurrency via Mural. International affiliates particularly appreciate the crypto option, which eliminates the wire transfer friction that kills payouts to non-US partners.
Pro Founder Tip: In your program settings, you can set a minimum payout threshold — the balance an affiliate must reach before they can request a withdrawal. This reduces payment processing overhead and simplifies your month-end accounting. A $50 or $100 minimum is common and rarely causes friction with active affiliates who are earning regularly.
You're Live
At this point you have a fully operational affiliate program: a commission structure set, partners invited, referral links generated, discount codes paired as backup attribution, and a payout flow that handles identity verification and international transfers automatically.
The last question is where to find affiliates worth inviting. The fastest answer is your existing user base — specifically anyone who has already mentioned your product publicly in a review, tweet, or blog post. They believe in the product and have an audience. You're adding a financial incentive to something they're already doing.
Beyond users: complementary tool founders (different product, same audience) make excellent affiliate partners because the cross-promotion is genuinely useful to both sides. One well-placed partnership outperforms fifty cold outreach attempts every time.
When you do invite someone, don't send them just the referral link. Send them a short explainer of what converts, a sample caption or tweet they can remix, and your best-performing screenshot or demo. The easier you make it to promote you, the more they actually will. The link alone sits in a folder. A toolkit gets used.
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