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Messages and emails

Sprout Affiliate talks to your affiliates in three ways: a live chat inside the app, one-off emails you write and send to a group, and automated emails that go out on their own when something happens. Chat and bulk email sit under Messages, which has two tabs: Messages (chat) and Email (bulk send).

Chat with your affiliates

Chat is on the Growth plan and above. On the free plan the Messages tab shows "Chatting with your affiliates is on the Growth plan" with a link to the Plans page, and your affiliates see "Messaging isn't available for this store" in their portal. If Shopify's billing service is briefly unreachable, chat stays switched on rather than switching off, so a billing blip never locks you out of your own conversations.

The left column lists every conversation, newest activity first, followed by every active affiliate you have not messaged yet. You cannot start a chat with a pending applicant or a paused affiliate: they do not appear in that list. High priority threads float to the top, then unread ones.

Each thread shows an unread count for messages the affiliate sent that you have not opened, and opening a thread marks them read. A search box and two filters appear once the list has more than five entries: Status (All, Open, Closed) and Priority (Any, High priority, Unread).

You can mark a thread resolved (it shows as Closed and can be filtered out) or priority, and reopen or clear either at any time. Resolved and priority are your own labels; the affiliate never sees either one. Messages are cut to 2000 characters each, and a thread loads up to 500 messages.

Your affiliates reply from the Messages page in their portal, or from the affiliate iPhone app (included on every plan). An affiliate who works with several stores that use Sprout Affiliate picks which store's thread they are in from a drop-down at the top of their Messages page. You can also read and answer chat from the merchant iPhone app, which is itself a Growth feature.

When your affiliate gets an email about a chat message. The first message you send in a conversation triggers an email telling them to open their portal. After that, the app stays quiet unless more than an hour has passed since your last message, so a burst of five short lines is one email, not five. Affiliates control this with the Messages toggle under Notifications in their portal settings.

A real limitation: when an affiliate replies to you, the app does not email you and does not send a phone notification. The only signal is the unread badge, which you see only once you open the Messages page (or the Messages screen in the merchant iPhone app). If you rely on chat for support, check the page rather than waiting to be told.

A second one: the conversation list is built from your 1000 most recent messages across all threads. On a very busy program, an old and quiet thread can drop off that list. The affiliate is still there in the list of people you can message, and opening them shows the conversation intact.

Applications waiting for a reply

If your program is listed in the Sprout marketplace, applications appear in a card at the top of the Messages page with the applicant's profile: the industries they cover, how they drive traffic, and the links they gave as proof. For each one you can write a reply (it goes out as an email from Sprout Affiliate, and when the applicant hits reply it comes back to your support email, or to your notification email if you have not set a support email), send a program invite (a join link tied to that person, quoting the program's real commission: the percentage, or the flat amount per referred order), or close it. The card sits on the Messages page and needs the Growth plan, exactly as chat does.

Bulk email

The Email tab sends one message to a group. Pick the recipients on the left, write the subject and body on the right, and send from the button in the page header, which shows the recipient count. Every email opens with the affiliate's name, and a blank line starts a new paragraph.

The subject is capped at 150 characters, the body at 5000, and you can add one optional button with a label (40 characters) and a link. A live preview sits under the compose box and is always on.

Recipient groups are All active affiliates, Pending applicants (people who applied but are not approved yet), and Programs and specific affiliates, where you search for people by name or email.

In the "Programs and specific affiliates" group, the send goes to everyone you picked by name plus every active affiliate on the programs you picked. Anyone in both lists is counted and emailed once, so the number on the Send button matches what goes out.

Anyone who has turned off activity emails in their portal is removed before sending, and the banner at the top tells you how many that is. That removal surprises merchants, so it is worth knowing why: the toggle the affiliate switched off is labelled "New commission" in their portal, and it governs your broadcasts too, because a broadcast is exactly the kind of mail that setting is about.

Daily email limits

Bulk email works on every plan, including free. What changes is how many affiliates you can email in a day. The limit protects the sending mailbox's reputation, which is what keeps your mail out of spam folders.

The counter is the number of people actually emailed today, read from the send log, and it resets at midnight on the server's clock, which may not line up with your store's timezone. Automated emails do not count against it. The limit applies to the send as a whole: if a group is larger than what you have left, nothing goes out and you are told how many you have left, rather than half the group receiving it.

Sends go out in batches of ten, and the log records what really left, so a partial failure does not eat your allowance. Your last 20 sends show in a table at the bottom of the page with the date, subject, group, and recipient count.

Automated emails

These go out on their own. Where a toggle is named, it is in the app under Settings > Notifications for your emails, or in the affiliate's portal under Notifications for theirs.

Two separate systems can learn about the same referred sale: the order webhook (a message Shopify sends the app the moment an order is placed) and the storefront pixel (a small piece of the app's code that runs in the shopper's browser and reports the sale when checkout finishes). Whichever of the two learns about the sale first is the one that sends, so one sale produces exactly one email of each kind. If that send fails, the other one is free to deliver it instead. There is one gap worth knowing: if the pixel records a referral that the app cannot then verify against Shopify, the commission is still recorded and still paid, but nobody is emailed about it.

White-label email

White labelling means your affiliates' emails carry your store's name where they would otherwise carry Sprout Affiliate's. It is on the Growth plan. Turn it on under Settings > Notifications ("Send affiliate emails under your store's name"), with a live preview next to the switch. It changes two things: the green header band shows your store name instead of the Sprout Affiliate logo and wordmark, and the small "Sent by Sprout Affiliate" line under the email is dropped.

What white labelling does and does not cover, because this is where expectations break:

• The email still sends from Sprout Affiliate's mailbox. White label changes the branding inside the message, not the sending address. Replies go to the contact name and address you set (your support email, or your notification email if no support email is set).
• It applies to the signup confirmation, approved, declined, commission earned, bulk email, and the three automatic payout emails to you: Payout sent, Scheduled payout failed, and Payout sent but not recorded.
• Everything else keeps Sprout Affiliate branding: your alerts about new applications, referral orders, and tax forms, plus sign-in links, iPhone sign-in codes, chat notifications, email-change confirmations, marketplace replies, and recruiting invites.
• The setting is checked when the email is sent, not when you save it. If you drop back to the free plan the switch stays saved but stops taking effect, and Sprout Affiliate branding returns.

Addresses to set first

Notification email is where your own alerts go. It is seeded from your Shopify store owner email. Clearing it is not a way to switch your alerts off: the app re-seeds it from your Shopify store owner email the next time you open the dashboard or the Payouts page, and that sync runs at most once every 5 minutes per store.

To stop the alerts, clear the two checkboxes under Settings > Notifications instead: "Email me when a new affiliate applies" and "Email me when an affiliate makes a sale".

Contact name is the name affiliates see on replies. Support email is what affiliates see and reply to, and it has its own card in Settings. Leave it blank to hide it from the portal, in which case replies fall back to your notification email.