What is Rewardful?

How Rewardful works, what it can do for your business, and what makes it different from other solutions.

Kyle Fox avatar
Written by Kyle Fox
Updated over a week ago

Rewardful is a quick and simple way for subscription-based businesses using Stripe to create and manage an affiliate program. Affiliates are people who promote your business on your behalf, and earn a commission from the customers they send you.

Your affiliates might be bloggers, social media influencers, strategic partners, agencies, or even happy customers who want to share your product!

Managing an affiliate program can be a headache, but our software makes it really easy. Here are some of the things Rewardful does for you:

  • Tracks clicks from affiliate links to your website

  • Keeps track of which affiliates referred which customers

  • Automatically calculates commissions when invoices are paid

  • Automatically adjusts commissions for upgrades, downgrades, cancellations and trials

  • Keeps track of how much you owe affiliates and reminds you when to pay them

  • Lets you configure how to reward your affiliates

  • Helps you recruit and manage your affiliates

  • Provides a neutral 3rd party for attribution

So if you haven't already, signup for Rewardful and have your affiliate program up & running in minutes!

How does Rewardful work?

There are three steps to setting up Rewardful:

  1. Connect your Stripe account

  2. Configure your campaign (i.e. commission structure)

  3. Integrate Rewardful into your website

Once this is complete, affiliates can join your affiliate program. After joining, they'll receive a unique link, something like example.com?via=james-bond

Rewardful knows when a customer came from an affiliate link, and associates the customer with the affiliate. Thereafter, any invoices paid by that referred customer will generate a commission for the affiliate according to the commission structure you defined in your campaign.

Rewardful shows both you and the affiliates the history of these commissions, along with their status: pending, due, paid, and voided.

  • Commissions start in pending status and remain there until their due date passes. By default, this is 30 days after the original sale, but you may update this to align with your own refunds policy*. If you've defined a minimum payout threshold for your program or a campaign, then commissions for affiliates who've not yet reached the minimum will remain in pending status until they've accumulated enough earnings.

  • Commissions become due after 30 days (or your custom configured number of days) and when the affiliate has reached your minimum payout amount. Rewardful will remind you when it's time to pay these so you never miss a payment and keep your affiliates happy!

  • Commissions are marked as paid show how much profit you've earned from affiliates and show your affiliates how much they've earned by promoting your product.

  • Commissions you mark as voided indicate commissions that are not valid for payout. These commissions will not be included in any of your dashboard metrics or added to any payouts.

*Note: For example, if your company has a 90 day refund policy, you may want to increase this value to 90 days as well. This reduces the likelihood that you'll refund a payment for which a commission has already been paid.

**Note: If an affiliate account is to be marked as active again, changing the commission status back to Due or Pending should be requested via Rewardful support.

Who uses Rewardful?

Rewardful is specifically designed for business who use Stripe Invoices for payment processing (both Subscription Invoices and One-time Invoices).

Rewardful works with any kind of business with recurring billing, for example:

  • Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses

  • Membership websites that charge a subscription

  • Service-based businesses that charge a recurring fee based on usage

  • Agencies or freelancers who charged a fixed retainer fee

Rewardful is extremely affordable compared to alternative solutions, making it a good fit for both new/bootstrapped and established/funded companies.

What makes Rewardful different?

  • Deep integration with Stripe

  • Affordable: existing solutions are often hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month

  • SEO friendly, human-readable links that point directly to your website (no redirects)

  • Built for recurring billing businesses like subscription and Software as as Service (SaaS) companies. Most existing affiliate software was built for one-time ecommerce transactions and have recurring commissions bolted-on as an afterthought.

  • There are no transaction fees or commissions β€” all you pay is the fixed monthly fee.

  • Simple and robust. Rewardful does one thing and does it really well. Other solutions suffer from feature bloat, and the complexity often leads to bugs unexpected technical problems.

  • You own your data: easy to import, but easy to export too if you decide Rewardful isn't right for you.

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