How do I set up an affiliate program on Shopify?
Short answer: Shopify has no affiliate program of its own. You either use Shopify Collabs, build one from discount codes and UTM links, or install an app. RewardMe gives every affiliate a tracked link and a shoppable video page on your own domain, rewards them in branded points, and runs customer loyalty from the same dashboard. Free plan, every feature included.
Picture a candle store with a few hundred orders a month. Three customers keep tagging the brand in short videos, the videos do better than anything the store posts itself, and nobody is getting paid for it. The owner wants to make it official: a link each creator can share, a commission when a follower buys, and a way to see which creator actually drove the sale. Then they open the Shopify admin and find… nothing. No affiliate tab. No commission setting. Just discount codes.
That gap is where this post lives. We’ve sat on the admin side of a partner program for our own apps, and the moment that breaks most programs is not recruiting creators. It’s tracking who sent the order and paying them without a spreadsheet.
Below: what Shopify gives you natively, the three ways to run an affiliate program, and a close look at RewardMe, a new app from a London developer that turns affiliates into creators with shoppable reels. Every fact about it comes from its App Store listing and its site, reward-me.app, checked on October 6, 2026. Where it doesn’t do something, we say so.
In this post
- What does Shopify give you for affiliates out of the box?
- What is RewardMe?
- How do shoppable reels on your own domain work?
- How do you set up the program, step by step?
- How do affiliates get paid?
- Can the same app run customer loyalty?
- How much does RewardMe cost?
- How does it compare with Shopify Collabs and UpPromote?
- What to check before you commit
- FAQ
What does Shopify give you for affiliates out of the box?
Two things, and neither is a complete program. You get discount codes, which can be assigned one per affiliate, and you get UTM parameters on links, which Shopify’s analytics will attribute. That’s enough to know roughly who sent a sale. It is not enough to pay anyone, because nothing adds up commissions, nothing gives the affiliate a place to see their numbers, and the moment a shopper types the code without clicking the link your attribution splits in two.
Shopify’s own answer is Shopify Collabs, a free app that handles creator recruitment, affiliate links and automatic commission payouts through your Shopify bill (with a 2.9% processing fee on automatic payments, per its listing). It works. But it’s built around Shopify’s creator network and cash commissions, and it has nothing to say about the content the creators make. The video lives on Instagram or TikTok, the link lives in a bio, and your store is the last stop.
| Route | What you get | Where it runs out |
|---|---|---|
| Discount codes + UTM links | Free. Rough attribution in Shopify analytics. | No commission maths, no affiliate portal, manual payouts from a spreadsheet. |
| Shopify Collabs | Free to install. Recruitment, links, codes, automatic cash payouts. | Cash only, 2.9% processing fee on automatic payments, no control over the creator content itself. |
| A dedicated affiliate app | Rules, portal, analytics, and in RewardMe’s case creator video pages on your domain plus customer loyalty. | A monthly plan once you pass the free allowance. |
Why doesn’t Shopify just add a commission field to discount codes? It would cover half of all small affiliate programs on its own. We’ve wondered this for years. Until it happens, the dedicated app is the route for any store that wants the affiliate to own a piece of the storefront rather than a line in a bio.
If you go the manual route anyway, two of our free tools take the pain out of it: the discount code generator for a clean code per affiliate, and the UTM link builder so every creator link is tagged the same way. Our guide to UTM parameters on Shopify explains what the analytics will and won’t attribute.
What is RewardMe?
RewardMe: Affiliates & Loyalty is an affiliate and loyalty app by Hi Ecom, a developer based at Kings Cross in London. It launched on the Shopify App Store on September 14, 2026, lists a free plan, and works with Shopify Checkout, the Shopify admin and Judge.me. At the time of writing it has no reviews yet. It is three weeks old.
The idea is simple. Affiliates sign up through your storefront, get a tracked link, and can build a shoppable video page that lives on your domain rather than on a social network. When a follower buys through that page, the affiliate earns points. You decide what the points are called, what they’re worth, and what they can be redeemed for. The same points engine runs customer loyalty, so a shopper who buys twice and an affiliate who refers ten orders are both earning Stars, or Gold, or whatever you named them.
One line on the listing stands out: “Our Free tier allows you to use all features.” That’s unusual in this category, where the free plan is normally a feature-gated teaser. Here the free plan is capped by volume (5 affiliates, 30 affiliate orders a month) rather than by what you can switch on. For a store testing whether creator content moves product at all, that’s the right shape.
How do shoppable reels on your own domain work?
A shoppable reel in RewardMe is a page on your store, built by the affiliate, holding up to five videos with shopping buttons that link to your products, collections or pages. The affiliate shares their link on social media. A follower opens it, watches, taps a button, lands on your product page and checks out through your normal Shopify checkout. The purchase is tracked to the affiliate and, if it qualifies under your rules, earns them points.
The “on your domain” part matters more than it sounds. The vendor’s demo page sits at a path under the store’s own domain through an app proxy, so the shopper never leaves your site and the page carries your branding. There are two layouts, Feed (one video at a time) and Carousel (a row), four colour themes called Immersive, Midnight, Daylight and Editorial, and the shopping action can be a plain button or a product card showing the linked item. The vendor’s own guide says there’s no universal winner between Feed and Carousel and to test both on a phone with real content. We’d agree.
Control is the other half. You can require approval before a reel goes live: the affiliate drafts, previews and submits, and you approve or send it back. You also control branding, product buttons and disclosures on creator pages. That last one is not a nicety. In the US, the FTC’s endorsement guides expect a creator’s commercial relationship to be disclosed clearly, and a disclosure you control on your own page is far easier to get right than one buried in a caption you don’t own.
And the page the button lands on has to hold up its end. A reel that shows the blue version and lands on a gallery full of the red one loses the sale at the last step, which is why we’d pair this with a different video per variant on the product page and variant image filtering so the gallery matches what the creator showed. If you want your own videos in a carousel on the product page itself, without an affiliate attached, that’s a different tool, and we covered it in our Moast shoppable videos guide.
How do you set up the program, step by step?
This is the order we’d do it in, based on the controls the listing and the vendor’s site describe. The listing also says the team does the configuration for free on every plan, including Free, so if you’d rather hand this over, you can.
- Install and name your points. Stars, Gold, Gems, or something that belongs to your store. The name is presentation; value, earning rules and rewards stay in your hands.
- Set the earning rules. Points per referred order, a maturation period (so points from an order that gets refunded never pay out), expiry, and any per-affiliate overrides or time-boxed campaigns.
- Open registration. Creators apply through your storefront. You review applications, add people manually, or import a CSV of partners you already work with.
- Decide on approval. Turn on review-before-publish for reels. Set your branding, button style and disclosure text once, so every creator page inherits them.
- Choose the rewards. Discounts, shipping rewards, and whether to allow PayPal or bank payout requests at all.
- Launch with one creator and a handful of products. Products with clean pages and current delivery info. The vendor’s guide says the first goal is to make sure the experience is understandable from both sides, not to recruit as many affiliates as possible. That’s good advice from any vendor.
Step two is where most programs we’ve seen go wrong. A commission that pays out the day the order is placed is a refund-fraud invitation. Set the maturation period at least as long as your returns window. Boring? Yes. It also saves you an awkward conversation with a creator three weeks later.
How do affiliates get paid?
In points, which the affiliate redeems in their portal for whatever you’ve enabled: a discount, a shipping reward, or a PayPal or bank payout request. The vendor is direct about the last one. RewardMe does not pay affiliates automatically. You review each payout request and pay it yourself.
Is that a weakness? It depends entirely on what you’re running. If your affiliates are professional publishers who expect a monthly wire, a manual queue is work, and Shopify Collabs’ automatic payouts will suit you better. If your affiliates are customers and small creators, points they can spend on your own products are often the reward they actually want, you keep the margin inside the store, and there’s no processing fee on a discount. Our store credit guide covers the same logic from the loyalty side. Run the numbers in our profit margin calculator before you set the points value: a 10% commission paid as a 10% discount costs you less than a 10% commission paid in cash.
Two more details from the site worth knowing. Points can carry a maturity period and an expiry date. And the analytics track referral revenue, redeemed rewards and net contribution, so the question “did this creator make us money after the rewards” has an answer on the dashboard rather than in a spreadsheet.
Can the same app run customer loyalty?
Yes, and that’s the real reason to look at it over a pure affiliate tool. Customers are enrolled automatically and earn points on eligible purchases. Members can check their balance, follow activity and request redemptions. The Judge.me integration awards points for leaving a product review, and the RewardMe API lets a developer award points for anything else you define, birthdays, engagement, your own events.
Keep the two populations distinct in your messaging. The vendor makes this point and we’d underline it: a customer earns points for their own purchases, an affiliate earns points for purchases they refer, and if you blur them your customers start thinking they have to make videos to get rewards. They don’t.
If loyalty is your main goal and affiliates are secondary, read our walkthrough on adding a loyalty program to Shopify and the loyalty app roundup first, because the dedicated loyalty apps go deeper on VIP tiers. If you’re already on Judge.me, our Judge.me guide covers the review side, and if your catalog groups colours as separate products, make sure those reviews display across the grouped products so the page a creator links to doesn’t show zero reviews while its sibling shows forty.
How much does RewardMe cost?
Plans are sized by monthly volume, every plan includes free configuration by the vendor’s team, and the listing is explicit that the Free tier has every feature. These are the four plans on the App Store listing as of October 6, 2026:
| Plan | Price | Affiliate orders | Affiliates | Loyalty customers | Loyalty orders | Over the allowance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 30 | 5 | 30 | 30 | Move to a paid plan |
| Starter | $10 a month | 150 | 15 | 150 | 300 | 4% of each extra order, max $0.60; $1.00 per extra affiliate |
| Basic | $40 a month | 750 | 75 | 750 | 1,500 | 3% of each extra order, max $0.50; $1.00 per extra affiliate |
| Pro | $150 a month | 2,500 | 150 | 2,500 | 3,000 | 2.5% of each extra order, max $0.25; $0.60 per extra affiliate |
Support is email and phone on every plan, with a 24 to 48 hour response target on Free and Starter and 12 to 24 hours on Basic and Pro. Billing runs through Shopify every 30 days in USD, so overage charges appear on your Shopify invoice.
The overage design is the part we like. It’s a percentage of the extra order’s value with a hard cap per order, so a $400 order on Starter costs you $0.60 extra, not $16. The pricing page on reward-me.app also shows an Enterprise plan at $600 a month with 10,000 orders, 500 affiliates and a 2% rate capped at $0.20 per extra order, which isn’t on the App Store listing yet. The site’s allowances differ from the listing by a few units on a couple of lines (it lists 50 loyalty customers on Free, for example), so treat the listing as the source of truth for what you’ll be billed and check it on the day you install.
How does that compare with running the whole thing on a spreadsheet? At five affiliates, the spreadsheet wins on price and loses on your Saturday. At fifteen, with payouts, approvals and refunds to reconcile, $10 a month stops being a real cost. Use our customer lifetime value calculator to see what a referred customer who comes back twice is worth before you decide how generous the points should be.
How does it compare with Shopify Collabs and UpPromote?
Honestly: on track record, RewardMe loses. Shopify Collabs is Shopify’s own app. UpPromote has 3,856 reviews and the Built for Shopify badge. RewardMe launched three weeks ago and has none. Figures below are from each app’s App Store listing on October 6, 2026.
| App | Rating | Launched | Free plan | Payouts | Creator content on your domain | Customer loyalty included |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RewardMe: Affiliates & Loyalty | No reviews yet | September 2026 | Yes, all features, 5 affiliates | Points: discounts, shipping, manual PayPal or bank | Yes, shoppable reels | Yes |
| Shopify Collabs | 4.2 (433) | By Shopify | Free to install | Automatic cash, 2.9% processing fee may apply | No | No |
| UpPromote Affiliate Marketing | 4.9 (3,856) | Established, Built for Shopify | Yes | Cash commissions | No | No |
| GOAFFPRO Affiliate Marketing | 4.6 (953) | Established | Yes | Cash commissions | No | No |
What that history buys the incumbents is years of edge cases already handled. What it costs them is scope: all three are affiliate tools that stop at the link. If your plan is “pay publishers cash per sale”, pick UpPromote or Collabs and don’t look back. If your plan is “turn the customers who already film our products into a creator program, and run loyalty from the same points”, RewardMe is the only one of the four built for that, and the free plan means finding out costs nothing but an afternoon.
One more reason the reels matter beyond the affiliate math: a video of a real person using the product on the page where you buy it is social proof in the place it converts. We’ve written about product page social proof tactics before, and creator video on your own domain is the version most stores still don’t have.
What to check before you commit
These are the things we’d test on our own store before inviting a single creator. None of them is a flaw; they’re the places where your situation decides the answer.
- Manual payouts. If you’ll offer cash, decide who reviews the queue and how often. If that’s nobody, offer discounts and shipping only. The app lets you choose.
- Languages. The listing lists English; the vendor’s site says the app is available in English, French, Italian, German and Danish. If your creators work in another language, check the storefront pages on a test reel first.
- Data access. The listing shows the app can view customer data and edit customers, products, orders, discounts, analytics and the Online Store. That’s normal for an app that creates discounts and storefront pages, but read the privacy policy linked on the listing before granting it.
- Attribution test. Place a test order through a reel link and confirm it lands on the right affiliate, then refund it and confirm the points behave the way your maturation setting says.
- Disclosure text. Write it once in the branding settings. “I earn rewards when you buy through this page” is clearer than any hashtag.
- Measure orders, not views. The vendor’s own guide says a click or a view is not an earned reward and to judge a pilot on attributed orders, reward cost and whether those shoppers return. Hold them to that standard.
And then the obvious one: it’s new. A three-week-old app with no reviews is a bet on the developer. The free plan with every feature is how they’re asking you to make that bet without spending anything, which is the right way to ask.
The features, plans and FAQ we quoted are on the RewardMe website, which the listing also links as the app documentation. You can click through a live shoppable reel on the vendor’s demo store, and their guide to shoppable reels for affiliate programs has a first-creator checklist worth reading.
Frequently asked questions
Which app should I use to set up an affiliate program on Shopify?
For cash commissions to professional publishers, Shopify Collabs (free, by Shopify) or UpPromote (4.9 stars, 3,856 reviews). For a creator program where affiliates build shoppable video pages on your own domain and earn branded points, with customer loyalty in the same app, RewardMe: Affiliates & Loyalty by Hi Ecom. Its free plan includes every feature for up to 5 affiliates and 30 affiliate orders a month.
Does Shopify have a built-in affiliate program?
Not in the admin itself. Shopify offers Shopify Collabs as a free app for creator recruitment, affiliate links and automatic commission payouts, with a 2.9% processing fee on automatic payments. Without an app you’re limited to one discount code per affiliate and UTM-tagged links, which attribute sales roughly but don’t calculate or pay commissions.
What are shoppable reels in RewardMe?
Pages on your store that an affiliate builds with up to five videos and shopping buttons linking to your products, collections or pages. They come in Feed or Carousel layouts with four colour themes. The affiliate shares the link, a follower watches and taps through to your product page, and an eligible tracked purchase earns the affiliate points. You can require approval before any reel goes live.
Does RewardMe pay affiliates automatically?
No. Affiliates earn points and redeem them in their portal for rewards you enable: discounts, shipping rewards, or PayPal and bank payout requests. You review and pay payout requests manually. If you want automatic cash payouts, Shopify Collabs handles those through your Shopify bill.
How much does RewardMe cost?
Free for 5 affiliates and 30 affiliate orders a month with every feature. Starter is $10 a month (150 affiliate orders, 15 affiliates), Basic $40 (750 orders, 75 affiliates) and Pro $150 (2,500 orders, 150 affiliates). Over the allowance you pay a percentage of each extra order with a per-order cap, from $0.60 on Starter down to $0.25 on Pro, plus a fee per extra affiliate. The vendor’s site also lists an Enterprise plan at $600 a month.
Can customers earn points for leaving a review?
Yes, through RewardMe’s Judge.me integration. A customer who leaves a product review earns points under your branded name, which they can redeem for the rewards you offer. For other actions, such as birthdays, the RewardMe API lets your developer award points for events you define.
Related reading
- How do I add a loyalty program to Shopify?
- Which Shopify app combines loyalty, referrals, and customer accounts?
- Moast shoppable videos: turn your own reels and UGC into revenue
- Best Shopify review apps 2026
- Shopify customer lifetime value: the guide
Go back to those three customers filming your candles. They’re already doing the work. The only question is whether the next video they post links to a page you control, with a reward you set, or to nothing at all. RewardMe’s free plan covers five creators with every feature switched on, which is exactly enough to find out.
Umid
Co-Founder at Craftshift