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The marketplace

The marketplace is a public directory of stores that are looking for affiliates. Each listed store gets a card in the directory and a listing page of its own. Affiliates browse it, read what you wrote, and send you an application. Nobody joins your program from the marketplace automatically. Every application arrives as a message you read and answer.

Your listing is controlled in the Shopify admin under Recruit > Marketplace listing. The View our marketplace button on that page opens the public directory in a new tab.

Affiliate accounts

An affiliate joins the marketplace at app.sproutaffiliate.com/marketplace/join with their name, email, password, the industries they cover, how they drive traffic, and a link proving each traffic source. That profile is copied onto every application they send you, as it read at the time they sent it.

The address is confirmed by email before anyone can apply. An unconfirmed member can browse the directory but not send you anything, so an application always carries an address that someone has proved they hold.

Members manage themselves at /marketplace/account: they can edit their profile, change their password, or delete the account. Deleting removes them from the marketplace but leaves applications they already sent with you, because those are your record of a message you received.

Who can browse it

The directory is behind a sign-in wall. A visitor who is not signed in sees a short page inviting them to create a free marketplace account or log in, and no store cards at all. Your listing is read by people who have identified themselves rather than by anonymous traffic.

Two kinds of account get past the wall:

• Affiliate portal accounts. Someone who already works with any Sprout Affiliate store. They also see the same directory inside their own portal, under the Marketplace tab, and in the Sprout Affiliate iPhone app.
• Marketplace members. Someone who signed up at the marketplace join page with no store behind them. The form requires a name, a valid email, a password of at least eight characters, at least one industry (from a fixed list of 38), at least one traffic method (18 methods across four groups: content-based traffic, incentive and deal traffic, paid media traffic, and direct and private channel traffic), at least one proof link for a method they picked, and agreement to the terms. Website and social handle are optional. So a member account names its industries, its traffic methods, and at least one link proving that traffic before it can send you an application.

A known limitation: the individual store listing page accepts only affiliate portal accounts. A marketplace member who clicks a store card or its cover is sent back to the directory. The Apply button on the card works for both account types, so members can still apply, they just cannot open the longer listing page.

Listing your store

Listing is on the Growth plan and above.

On Free, saving with the listing box ticked fails outright and nothing on the page is saved, including the text you just typed. The error reads "The marketplace listing is on the Growth plan.

Upgrade on the Plans page." If you want to write your listing before you upgrade, leave the box unticked and save. Everything except the tick is stored, and you turn it on after upgrading. (In Settings > Marketplace the same checkbox is disabled below Growth, so you cannot tick it there at all.)

Four things have to be true before your card appears in the directory:

1. The List this store on the Sprout marketplace box is ticked and saved.
2. Sprout Affiliate is still installed on your store. Uninstalling removes the store from the directory.
3. You are still on Growth or higher. The directory rechecks your plan every time it is built, not only when you save, so dropping to Free takes your card down within about five minutes (that is how long the plan answer is cached). If your plan cannot be read at all, that counts as a billing hiccup rather than a downgrade and your card stays up.
4. You have at least one active program. A store with every program paused is skipped entirely, with no error anywhere. If your card has vanished, check this first.

Untick the box to come off the directory yourself.

What you fill in, and where it shows

The 20 brand categories are Fashion, Beauty, Health & Wellness, Fitness, Food & Drink, Home & Garden, Electronics, Photography, Art & Design, Jewelry, Kids & Baby, Pets, Outdoors, Sports, Toys & Games, Books & Media, Travel, Music, Software, and Automotive. You cannot add your own.

Payout period is a description, not a setting. It changes nothing about when anyone is actually paid. It only tells applicants what to expect.

The video URL is cleaned before it is stored. A bare domain gets https:// added. Anything that is not a normal web address is stored as blank, so if your video link disappears on save, that is why. You get a blank from an address starting with anything other than http:// or https:// (such as javascript: or data:), one carrying a username and password in front of the host, one with a port number after the host, a hostname with no dot in it, a local address such as localhost or 127.0.0.1, or anything over 300 characters.

The listing page also shows how many active programs you run. The Recruit page previews your card as you type, but the preview is partial: it shows your store name, category pills, description, payout period, and hashtags, with a grey placeholder where the cover goes and no "looking for" line.

Edit your listing in one place, the Recruit page. The older marketplace panel in Settings > Marketplace writes the same description field but caps it at 200 characters, so saving there will shorten a longer description you wrote on the Recruit page.

The cover image

The card picks a cover in this order: the custom cover image you uploaded, then a grid of up to four of your most recently published active product photos, then a plain tile with your logo and store name. The product photos refresh every time you save the Recruit listing page, every time you save the Marketplace panel in Settings, and again a few seconds after the app restarts, so deleted products age out on their own. You do not have to upload anything for the card to look like a real storefront.

The cover and the logo live in different places, which is easy to miss. The custom cover is in Settings > Marketplace ("Use a custom cover instead"), shrunk in your browser so its longest side is at most 1400 pixels, then refused if the result is still over about 2 MB. The logo on the fallback tile is the signup page logo you upload under Displays. The "Change in Settings" link on the Recruit listing page sends you to the Links & coupons tab of Settings, which holds neither the cover nor the logo.

How an affiliate applies

Apply sends you a message. It does not create an affiliate, does not issue a coupon, and does not start tracking anything. The form asks for name, email, an optional website, an optional social handle, and a message of up to 2000 characters. Signed-in applicants get their name and email filled in from their account.

When the applicant is a marketplace member, their profile travels with the application: the industries they cover, the traffic methods they use, and their proof links with monthly traffic figures. That snapshot is copied onto the application at the moment they send it, so what you read next month is what you were told then, not whatever they have edited since.

Two guards sit on the form. An email address can only have one unanswered application per store at a time, and a store accepts at most 100 applications per day (counted across everything created that day, answered or not).

Links are cleaned the same way your video URL is. Sprout Affiliate also checks the applicant's website against Google Safe Browsing, Google's list of sites known to carry malware or run phishing, when a key for that service is configured.

A flagged website is refused with an explanation instead of being passed to you. With no key, or if Google does not answer, the link reaches you unchecked, so treat any link in an application as something the applicant typed, not something Sprout Affiliate has vouched for.

Applications sent from inside the Sprout Affiliate iPhone app take a shorter path: they are saved to your queue, but they carry no profile snapshot, no website and no social handle, and they do not send you the notification email described below. The 100-a-day limit is not checked on this path either, though these applications still count towards it for anyone applying from the web.

Where applications land

Open Messages in the app. Applications appear in a card at the top of the page, newest first, up to 50 at a time, with a "waiting" count. Each one shows the name, email, date, any links, the message, the industry and traffic pills, and the traffic proof links.

You have three actions per application:

• Send reply. Emails the applicant from Sprout Affiliate, with your support email (or your notification email if there is no support email) as the reply-to, so their answer comes back to you by normal email. The application is marked replied and keeps a Replied badge until you close it.
• Send program invite. Pick a program from the dropdown next to the button. The email names the commission (a percentage, or a flat amount per referred order in your store currency) and carries a join link for that program. They still complete your signup page, and your usual approval setting decides whether they go active immediately or wait for you. The picker starts on the program you chose in your listing.
• Close. Removes it from the list.

The Messages page is on the Growth plan. On Free it shows only "Chatting with your affiliates is on the Growth plan", so you cannot see or answer applications there, even ones that arrived while you were listed. The applications are not lost. They stay in your queue and appear when you upgrade.

You also get an email for each new application, provided you have a notification email set and the new application notification switched on in Settings. That switch is shared with new affiliate signups, so turning it off silences both.

The email includes the message and the applicant's profile so you can judge it without opening the admin. If the email fails to send, the application is still saved. Nothing on your dashboard counts marketplace applications, so the email and the Messages page are the only two places you will hear about one.

What the marketplace does not do

There is no search, no category filter, and no sorting. Affiliates scroll a single horizontal row of every listed store, with arrows once there are more than two, and the category pills are labels rather than filters. The row has no sort order at all, so stores appear in no particular order, and nothing you fill in moves your card nearer the front. Your description and your "looking for" line are doing the work of getting the right people to click, so write them for a person scanning quickly.