How to structure commissions, set attribution windows, and recruit the right affiliates for your business — before you launch, not after.
Setting up an affiliate program in India means defining your objective and eligible offers, choosing a commission model and attribution window, writing compliant program terms (including ASCI disclosure requirements), setting up tracking, and building a recruitment, onboarding, and payout process affiliates can actually follow. Getting these decisions right before launch — not improvised after the first dispute — is what keeps a program running smoothly. Part of our affiliate marketing services.
Before choosing a commission model or writing a single line of program terms, decide what you actually want affiliate marketing to do for the business. New customer acquisition, wider brand reach in an audience your own marketing doesn't reach, and qualified lead generation are three different goals, and each one changes who you recruit, how you structure payouts, and what you measure as success. A program built for customer acquisition rewards a completed purchase; a program built for lead generation might reward a qualified enquiry instead. Deciding this first keeps every later step in this guide pointed at the same outcome instead of pulling in different directions.
Not every product or service in your catalog necessarily belongs in an affiliate program. Decide which products, services, or offers are in scope before you recruit anyone — low-margin items may not leave enough room for a meaningful commission once your own costs are covered, and regulated or high-consideration categories such as financial products or healthcare services need tighter promotional language than an average affiliate will apply without being told. Publishing this scope in writing before launch avoids the awkward dispute of clawing back a commission on a sale you never intended to reward.
Percentage-of-sale commissions work well for e-commerce and subscription businesses, where rewarding affiliates proportionally to order value keeps incentives aligned. Flat-rate commissions suit lead-generation or signup-driven businesses, where a fixed payout per qualified lead or signup is simpler to track and communicate than a variable percentage tied to a deal size the affiliate doesn't control.
An attribution window determines how long after a referral click a resulting sale still counts toward the affiliate's commission. A shorter sales cycle (impulse purchases, low-cost products) suits a 7-day window; a longer, considered purchase (high-ticket items, B2B services) often needs 30 days or more so affiliates aren't penalized for a customer who takes time to decide.
Put your commission rate, payout schedule, prohibited promotional tactics, and disclosure requirements into a single written document every affiliate agrees to before their referral link goes live. This is also where you set out the disclosure obligations covered in detail in the Affiliate Disclosure & Compliance section below — affiliates should be contractually required to disclose the relationship on every piece of promotional content, not just informed of it in a welcome email they may never reread. Spelling out payout terms and prohibited tactics here, rather than improvising a response the first time a rule gets broken, is what keeps disputes rare instead of routine.
Every affiliate needs a unique referral link or code tracked by an attribution platform — see our affiliate tracking tools guide for what to look for. This comes after terms and disclosure, not before, because the tracking platform should be configured to match the commission model, attribution window, and payout rules you've already committed to in writing — reconfiguring tracking after affiliates are already active is far more disruptive than getting it right once.
Before you start outreach, define what makes someone a good fit for your program rather than recruiting anyone who applies. The strongest early affiliates are usually already-satisfied customers, niche bloggers, and micro-influencers whose audience overlaps with yours — not the affiliates with the largest following, but the ones whose audience is genuinely likely to buy. Writing down your criteria (audience relevance, existing engagement, willingness to follow your disclosure and content rules) before you recruit makes it easier to say no to a poor fit.
A new affiliate's first experience with your program is the onboarding sequence — the welcome message, the program guidelines document, and the tracking link or dashboard credentials they need to start promoting. Get this right and an affiliate can make their first referral within a day of approval; get it wrong and they sit on an unused link because nobody actually told them how to use it. Our email marketing for affiliate programs guide covers building this welcome sequence in more detail.
Affiliate communication doesn't end at onboarding — active affiliates need a steady cadence of new offer announcements, program updates, and payout confirmations to stay engaged and keep promoting. Most programs use email for detailed updates (commission changes, catalog updates, performance reports) and WhatsApp for time-sensitive alerts affiliates are more likely to see quickly, such as a flash sale or a payout that's just gone out. See our WhatsApp marketing for affiliates and email marketing for affiliate programs guides for how to structure both channels.
Not every tracked conversion should be paid out automatically. Before releasing a commission, check that the underlying sale wasn't cancelled at checkout, doesn't show obvious fraud flags (an affiliate referring their own purchase, an implausible spike in conversions from one source), and matches the product scope you defined in Step 2. Most attribution platforms support a holding period between a tracked sale and an approved commission specifically so this validation can happen before money moves.
Decide your refund and cancellation policy for commissions before launch, not after your first dispute. The standard approach is to reverse the affiliate's commission whenever the underlying sale is refunded, cancelled, or charged back within your standard return window, stated plainly in your program terms so no affiliate is surprised by a clawback. Programs that improvise this rule after the fact tend to lose affiliate trust even when the reversal itself is entirely reasonable, because it reads as a rule invented after the money was already expected.
Affiliate performance data needs periodic review, not just automated tracking. Set a recurring cadence — monthly is typical for a small-to-mid program — to look for fraud patterns an automated system can miss on its own: self-referrals, cookie stuffing, coupon or discount-code misuse, and any affiliate whose conversion rate is implausibly higher than the rest of the program. The same review is also where you assess overall program health — which affiliates are actually driving results and whether it's time to revisit the objective you set in Step 1.
When an affiliate earns a commission for promoting your product, that commission creates what Indian advertising self-regulation treats as a "material connection" between the affiliate and your brand. The Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI)'s guidelines for influencer and affiliate advertising require that connection to be disclosed to the audience — clearly and upfront — whenever an affiliate posts a review, recommendation, or promotional link. This applies regardless of the platform: a blog post, an Instagram caption, a YouTube description, or a WhatsApp broadcast.
ASCI's guidance accepts a small set of plain-language labels as sufficient disclosure, provided they're placed where a viewer will actually see them — not buried in a bio, a pinned comment, or a wall of hashtags. Require your affiliates to use one of:
The label should appear upfront — in the first line or two of a caption or post, not after a "read more" break — and in a font size and colour that's actually legible, not hidden in tiny fine print or white-on-white text.
Build disclosure into your affiliate agreement, not just your onboarding email. Written program terms should explicitly require every affiliate to disclose the commercial relationship on every piece of promotional content, name which labels are acceptable, and state that failure to disclose is grounds for removal from the program and forfeiture of pending commission. Under ASCI's framework, both the advertiser (you) and the promoter (the affiliate) share responsibility for a missing or inadequate disclosure, so a contract clause that only protects your brand's messaging isn't enough — it needs to actively require the affiliate to act.
Only let affiliates make claims you can substantiate. An affiliate should never publish a performance, health, safety, or earnings claim about your product that your own marketing team couldn't back up with data. If your product page doesn't claim "3x faster delivery" or "guaranteed results," your affiliates shouldn't either — a claim made by an affiliate while promoting your product is, for compliance purposes, treated as an extension of your own advertising.
Review promotional content before it goes live, or issue creative guidelines that make review unnecessary. For a small program, a simple pre-publish approval step for anything beyond a standard referral link catches most compliance and brand-safety problems before they're public. For larger programs where reviewing every post isn't practical, publish clear written creative guidelines — approved claims, required disclosure language, and a short list of what's off-limits — so affiliates have a rulebook to follow even when nobody reviews their specific post.
Set explicit limits on promotional tactics. Affiliates should not invent discount percentages that don't match your actual pricing, fabricate urgency ("only 2 left!" when stock isn't actually low), or imply an endorsement, certification, or result the product doesn't have. These aren't just compliance risks — a misleading claim traced back to an affiliate still damages your brand's credibility with the customer who acted on it.
Keep records. Retain signed affiliate agreements, the disclosure language each affiliate agreed to use, and a copy or screenshot of approved creative for every active affiliate. If a disclosure or claims dispute ever comes up — from a customer, a platform, or a regulator — being able to show what was agreed and what was actually approved is the difference between a quick resolution and a drawn-out one.
Percentage-of-sale commissions suit e-commerce and subscription products; flat-rate commissions suit lead-generation or signup-based businesses where transaction value varies widely.
The time period after a referral click during which a resulting sale is still credited to the affiliate — commonly 7 to 30 days depending on the typical sales cycle.
Start with existing customers, industry bloggers, and micro-influencers in your niche, then expand through affiliate directories and networks once the program has a track record.
Yes, an attribution and tracking platform is essential for accurate commission calculation at any meaningful scale — manual tracking doesn't hold up past a handful of affiliates.
No — MetaReach provides the infrastructure layer: email and WhatsApp affiliate communication, plus help selecting and configuring an attribution/tracking platform. Program design, commission structuring, and affiliate recruitment are decisions your own team makes; once you've made them, we help you implement and communicate them to your affiliates.
From startups to enterprises — brands that grow with MetaReach
