Sprout AffiliateGetting affiliates
Sprout Affiliate gives you four ways to bring people into a program: a public signup page, invites you send yourself, the Sprout network, and a listing on the Sprout marketplace. None of them puts someone into your program the moment they sign up. Every route ends with either an application (yours to approve, or approved for you if you turned on auto-approve) or a message you answer, and when you invite someone you choose which program the invite is for.
Your public signup page
Cookie duration, commission, and any extra terms are shown above the form, so nobody signs up without seeing the deal. The fields themselves are yours to choose: five templates decide which appear.
Every store gets a hosted signup page at app.sproutaffiliate.com/join/your-store-handle, where the handle is your Shopify subdomain (the mystore part of mystore.myshopify.com). The Programs page shows the full link for each program with a Copy button next to it. The page lives on Sprout Affiliate's domain rather than your storefront, so it still works while your store is password protected. The same form is also served on your own storefront at /apps/sprout/signup, through Shopify's app proxy (a setting that lets a path on your domain be answered by the app).
The link carries ?campaign= and the program's slug, which is the program name in lowercase with every space and symbol turned into a hyphen (Summer Creators becomes summer-creators), to point at a specific program. Without it, the page opens the program marked Default on your Programs page, and falls back to the oldest program you created only if you have not marked one. Either way, the program it lands on has to be active: if it is paused, the page shows a short "Applications are closed" message even when your other programs are live.
The form asks for first name, last name, email, and a password (8 characters minimum, entered twice). It does not ask for payout details or a discount code. Affiliates set those in their portal after they are approved.
Above the form, a benefits box lists the cookie window (how many days after someone clicks the affiliate's link their order still counts as that affiliate's), whether the commission is percentage, flat, or tiered, the amount, the customer discount if the program offers one, your extra terms, and any perks set on the program. The cookie row is left out when the program has an infinite cookie duration, which is stored as zero days.
The page is translated into 26 languages, with right-to-left layout for Arabic and Hebrew. It picks the language from ?lang= on the URL, then the visitor's browser, then falls back to English. Only the Classic template shows a language picker on the page itself. Under Settings, "Hide the affiliate signup page from search engines" adds a noindex robots tag, which asks Google and Bing to keep the page out of their results.
The confirmation step matters. A new signup does not reach you straight away. Sprout Affiliate emails the applicant a confirmation link, and the application stays invisible until they click it. Only then does it appear in your queue (or auto-approve). That link expires after 3 days.
If someone says they applied and you cannot find them, they almost certainly never clicked that email. They can sign up again: an unconfirmed application is replaced by the new one. Someone already in that program with the same email is told to sign in instead, since it is one membership per person per program.
If a visitor is already signed in to a Sprout portal for another store, the page offers a one-click join using their existing account. The one-click join skips the confirmation email, because being signed in to that account already proves they own the email address.
The five signup templates
| Template | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Classic | Dark brand panel on the left, benefits and form on white to the right. |
| Bold | Full-width hero, numbered benefit cards, form lower down the page. |
| Minimal | One centred card on a tinted background. |
| Spotlight | Large headline and benefit tiles on the left, form panel on the right. |
| Editorial | Dark, oversized type, a scrolling strip, terms as a numbered list. |
You pick the template, logo, colours, and font under Displays, then Registration. The four alternate templates (Bold, Minimal, Spotlight, and Editorial) are a Growth plan feature: on the Free plan those tiles are greyed out and a save keeps the Classic layout, while your logo, colours, font, and wording still save.
Three fields are stored per program rather than shop-wide: Headline, Intro text, and Additional terms. Ticking "Give this program its own look" puts the whole design on that one program instead of the shop-wide one. The Bold, Minimal, Spotlight, and Editorial pages carry a "Powered by Sprout Affiliate" line. Removing it is a Professional plan feature.
Inviting people yourself
Recruit, then the Invite tab. Enter a name or handle, optionally where you plan to send it, and pick a program. The program is required, so the invite creates the right membership, and the button is unavailable until you have at least one active program.
"Generate invite template" writes two drafts for you: a full email and a short version for DMs. Both state your commission rate and carry an invite link that records the first time it is opened and the application it produces.
Sprout Affiliate does not send these. You copy the email, DM or link and send it from your own account. That is deliberate, since a message from your address gets read and a bulk send from an unknown domain does not.
The "Invites you've sent" list under the form shows each invite as Not opened, Clicked, or Joined, with a running count of how many were sent, opened, and joined. Only the first click is recorded, so the opened count is people rather than visits. Deleting an invite removes it from the list.
The Sprout network
The Sprout network is the pool of affiliates who turned on "List me in the Sprout network" in their own portal settings. They are visible to every store using Sprout Affiliate. On the Sprout network tab you see each person's name, photo, pitch, website, social links, tags, and how many stores they already promote for.
You never see their email address. Sprout Affiliate sends the invite for you, including a personal note you write (up to 1000 characters) and an invite link that records the first click and any application it produces. The tab shows up to 100 people.
The rules that stop network invites turning into spam are strict:
- One invite per person per store, permanently. Deleting the invite row does not let you send again.
- 20 network invites per store per day, and 150 across all stores per day. Either limit tells you to try again tomorrow.
- Anyone already in your affiliate list is filtered out, whatever their status.
- Some people turn off "Email me invites". Their invite is still created and appears on their portal dashboard, but no email goes out.
- Every network email carries an unsubscribe link. Using it turns their listing off for every store at once.
If the tab looks empty, nobody has opted in yet who is not already in your affiliate list. That is normal for a new install.
Your marketplace listing
Recruit, then Marketplace listing. This puts your store in the Sprout marketplace directory, where affiliates browse brands and apply. It is a Growth plan feature, and the check runs when you save: on the Free plan, saving with "List this store on the Sprout marketplace" ticked is refused outright and nothing on the page is stored.
Untick it and the rest of the details save fine, so you can prepare the listing before you upgrade. Your plan is checked again for every listing each time the directory is built, so a store that drops back to Free stops appearing rather than staying listed.
The listing holds: the program applicants join, up to 3 brand categories, a description (up to 2000 characters), a line about who you are looking for, your payout period as a sentence affiliates read (writing it changes nothing about when payouts actually run), an optional video URL, and hashtags. Three more fields, the audience age range, gender, and up to 10 countries, are saved with the rest but are not shown to affiliates anywhere yet.
Your website comes from your store settings and cannot be edited here. The logo is the one you uploaded under Displays, then Registration, and the cover image comes from Settings, then Marketplace (without one, the card uses a grid of up to four of your most recently published active product photos). A live preview of the card sits at the bottom of the page. Your store only appears in the directory if it has at least one active program.
Affiliates cannot browse the directory anonymously. They need either a free marketplace account or an existing Sprout portal login, which means the people who apply have at least filled in a profile.
How applications reach you
Applications land in one of two places depending on where the person came from, and looking in the wrong one is the usual reason a merchant cannot find someone.
| Where they came from | Where you handle it | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Signup page, invite link, network invite | Affiliates page, "Pending applications" | A real affiliate account waiting for approval |
| Marketplace listing | Messages page, "Applications" | A message, not an account |
A marketplace application never joins anyone to a program. It is an introduction with their name, email, website, social handle, and message, plus a snapshot of their marketplace profile (the industries they cover, how they drive traffic, and the links they offer as proof of it, with monthly figures where they gave them) taken at the moment they applied, so what you read later is what you were told then. Sprout Affiliate emails you about it only if you have a notification email set under Settings and "Email me when a new affiliate applies" is on.
Marketplace applicants are capped at one open application per email per store (replying to it or closing it frees them to send another) and 100 applications per store per day. A website link that Google Safe Browsing flags as malicious is refused before the application is created.
Approving and declining
On the Affiliates page each pending application shows the person's name, email, payout method if they have set one, program and commission rate. You get Approve and Reject on each one, and Approve all when more than one is waiting.
Approving marks them active and emails them to say so. That email carries their discount code if one was created and a button into their portal, where their referral link lives. Whether a discount code is created depends on your plan. On Free and Growth none is created, so approval hands them a referral link and no code, and they set a code themselves in the portal or you assign one on their profile.
On Professional or higher they get the code they asked for, and if they never asked, one is built from their name whenever the program's customer discount is above 0%. A program with "Offer a customer discount" switched off approves everyone with a link and no code on every plan.
The public signup form has no code field, so nobody who applied through it has asked for one. If a code cannot be created (usually because a discount with that code already exists in your store outside Sprout), that one approval fails with the reason and you can retry it on its own, while a bulk approve tells you how many did not go through.
Rejecting deletes the application and emails the applicant. There is no rejected list to look back at, and nothing stops them applying again.
If you would rather not review anyone, turn on "Auto-approve new affiliates" under Settings, in Affiliate approvals. Customer referral programs always approve instantly regardless of that setting, because asking a customer to wait for review defeats the point. Customer referral programs are themselves a Growth plan feature.
For marketplace applications on the Messages page you have three actions: Send reply (an email the applicant can reply straight back to), Send program invite (emails them a join link for the program you pick and still routes them through the normal signup and approval flow), or Close, which removes it from your list without telling them anything.
One limitation to plan around: the Messages page as a whole is a Growth feature, so marketplace applications cannot be read, replied to or closed on the Free plan. Since the marketplace listing itself needs Growth too, that gap only bites if you were listed and then downgraded.