How Affilibee works

Affilibee sits between affiliate-driven traffic and commission payout operations. Your platform owns the storefront, checkout, and order lifecycle. Affilibee receives attribution and completed order data, applies your commission rules, and organizes commissions into payout periods.

Documentation explains the workflow and operating model.

Use API integration for the recommended implementation path, API introduction for the API reference overview, and Create order for endpoint details.

The lifecycle

Most implementations follow the same five-part flow:

an affiliate sends a visitor to your site through an affiliate link
your platform captures the affiliate slug and keeps it available through checkout
your system creates and completes the order
your platform submits the completed order to Affilibee
Affilibee calculates commissions and later moves them into payout periods

Attribution starts on your platform

Affilibee does not own your storefront session or checkout state. Your platform is responsible for capturing the affiliate slug when a visitor arrives, preserving it through the purchase flow, and attaching it to the order that will later be submitted.

For most teams, this means storing a first-party cookie or similar attribution state and then persisting that value to the order record when the customer checks out.

Orders are submitted after they are valid

Affilibee is designed to receive completed order data from your system. In practice, that means sending orders once they reach a state in your platform that you consider valid for commission tracking, such as confirmed or completed.

That submission is the moment when Affilibee can attribute the order to the affiliate slug you captured earlier and apply the commission rules you have configured.

Commissions come from your configuration

Affilibee does not invent commission logic at submission time. The submitted order is evaluated against the structure you have already defined, including affiliate tiers, default rates, and any product segments that override the default behavior.

That is why commission setup should be in place before you send live traffic. See Commissions for the configuration model behind those calculations.

Payments happen after commissions are confirmed

Attributed commissions do not move straight to payout. They first sit inside payment periods, where there is still time to review adjustments, refunds, or commission changes before the payout is finalized.

Once a payment period is confirmed, the included commissions move toward payout according to the schedule described in Payments.

Where to go next

If you want the implementation details, continue with API integration. If you want the terminology behind the workflow, continue with Core concepts.