Sub-affiliate recruiting

Sub-affiliate recruiting lets an existing affiliate (A) recruit a new affiliate (B) through a personal recruitment link. When B converts a sale, A earns a small override on top of B's normal commission. B still earns the same headline rate they always did; the override comes out of your program budget, not B's pocket.

Use it when:

• You want your strongest creators to seed the program for you.
• Your audience is creator-adjacent (podcasters, YouTubers, course operators).
• You're willing to pay a finder's fee for high-quality referrals at the cost of a small extra commission line.

Not MLM. One tier. Full stop.

This is the part to read carefully before turning it on.

• Hard cap at 1 tier. A recruits B. A earns an override on B's sales. That's it. If B then recruits C, A earns nothing on C's sales. B earns nothing on C's recruits-of-recruits, because there are none to earn from beyond a single hop.
• No chain propagation. Overrides never cascade up a tree. The schema literally cannot represent more than one upstream recruiter per affiliate (Affiliate.RecruitedByAffiliateId is a single nullable foreign key).
• Single override layer. Each sale produces at most one override row, paired with at most one parent commission row.
• Primary earnings come from the affiliate's own sales. B earns commission on the sales B drives. A earns commission on the sales A drives. The override is a supplementary line, not the headline payout.

If you've seen pyramid-style affiliate programs before, this is structurally different: there's no downline beyond depth 1, no recruiter-of-recruiter income, no compounding tiers. It's a 1099-eligible finder's fee with a fixed depth, modeled in the database and enforced in the backend.

Setup (brand side)

Sub-affiliate overrides are configured per campaign, not org-wide. Different campaigns can have different override percentages, or you can leave overrides off entirely on some campaigns.

1. Open /dashboard/campaigns/[id] for the campaign you want to enable.
2. Find the "Sub-affiliate recruiting" section.
3. Toggle Allow sub-affiliate recruiting on.
4. Set Override commission percent to a value between 0 and 100. Typical values are 5 to 15 percent.
5. Save.

Plan tier: Pro or higher to enable on a campaign. (The affiliate-side recruitment link is unrestricted: if you turn this on, every approved affiliate in that campaign gets one automatically.)

Permissions: Owner role on the org. The change is audit-logged as program.sub_affiliate_config_updated.

What the math looks like

Imagine:

• Campaign override percent: 10%
• B's commission rate on the campaign: 20%
• Customer makes a $100 sale through B's tracking link.

What happens:

1. B's commission row is created: $100 sale, $20 commission (20% of $100).
2. An override row is created for A: $0 sale amount, $2 commission (10% of B's $20).

A's override is computed against B's commission, not against the underlying sale. If you raise the override percent, A earns more from the same B sale. If you lower B's commission rate, A's override drops proportionally even though the sale amount didn't change.

Affiliate experience

Approved affiliates in a recruiting-enabled campaign see a "Recruit" tab at /a/recruit. They get:

• A personal recruitment link in the form https://{yourbrand}.rekomi.com/{slug}?recruited_by={affiliateId} (or your own domain, if you serve the public landing page there).
• A live count of who they've recruited and how much override they've earned.
• A copy-link button for sharing on social.

When a recruit (B) lands on the public apply page through that link, the recruitedByAffiliateId is captured in the form submission and stored on the new affiliate row. Once B is approved by you (or auto-approved by the campaign), every sale B drives produces both B's commission row and A's override row, atomically, in the same transaction.

Refund behavior

If a parent conversion (B's sale) is refunded in full, the override (A's row) is reversed in full at the same time.

If the parent conversion is partially refunded (only some of the sale amount comes back), the override is reduced proportionally. Example:

• Original B commission: $20 on a $100 sale.
• Original A override: $2.
• Customer is refunded $40 (40% of the sale).
• B's commission is clawed back by 40% ($8 reversed, $12 remaining).
• A's override is clawed back by 40% ($0.80 reversed, $1.20 remaining).

Both refund cascades are written to the audit log and trigger conversion.refunded webhooks for any subscribed endpoints.

Caveats

• B must be Approved. While B is in Pending or Rejected status, B's tracked clicks are still recorded for analytics but no commission rows fire, and no override fires for A. The override only triggers once B is in Approved status.
• Recruitment is one-directional and immutable. Once A recruits B and B is approved, the link cannot be transferred to a different recruiter, even by you as the brand. This is a deliberate audit-trail decision; if you need to fix a mis-recruit, contact support.
• Self-recruit is blocked. B cannot pass their own affiliate id as their recruiter. The backend rejects this at apply time.
• Recruits do not have to share a campaign with their recruiter. A in campaign X can recruit B who joins campaign Y, as long as Y has recruiting enabled. The override percent used is Y's, not X's.
• Toggling off doesn't break existing recruits. If you disable sub-affiliate recruiting on a campaign after some recruits have been approved, those existing recruiter-recruit links stay intact and overrides continue to fire for new sales. Toggling off only prevents new recruitment links from being shared (the affiliate-side UI hides the Recruit tab).

Tax handling

Override income IS taxable to the recruiter (A). It counts toward Rekomi's 1099-NEC USD reporting threshold (currently $600/year in USD-equivalent for U.S. affiliates). If A earns $580 from their own sales and $100 in overrides in a calendar year, that's $680 total and crosses the threshold. Rekomi's tax-form flow already aggregates both lines for you.

See Tax forms for the full compliance flow.

Plan tier

Affiliates never pay anything. The Pro gate is on the brand side, on the toggle.

FAQ

Can I run this without telling my existing affiliates?

Technically yes. The Recruit tab only appears for approved affiliates on a recruiting-enabled campaign, so you can flip it on and existing affiliates will discover it. In practice, send a one-line broadcast: "We just turned on a 10% recruit-and-earn bonus. Share your link from /a/recruit." Adoption is much higher when affiliates know it exists.

Can I set different override percents per affiliate?

Not today. The override percent is per-campaign. If you want a tiered structure, create separate campaigns with different override percents and route VIP affiliates into the campaign with the higher rate.

What if I want a true 2-tier program later?

You can't enable a deeper chain through configuration. It's a hard cap in the schema. If your business requires a 2-tier or N-tier model down the line, that's a feature request, not a setting flip. Open a support ticket and we'll talk through whether it's worth the regulatory complexity.

Will my affiliates see who recruited whom?

Affiliates only see their own downline. They cannot see who recruited them, and they cannot see anyone else's downline. The brand-side admin (you) can see the full graph.

Does this work with coupon-code attribution?

Yes. If B's sale is attributed through a coupon (rather than a click on a referral link), the override still fires for A as long as B is the affiliate who owns the coupon. The attribution path of the parent sale doesn't change anything about how the override is computed.

Does this work with pixel tracking and S2S?

Yes. Override rows fire on every Rekomi-attributed conversion regardless of which ingestion path produced the parent commission (Stripe webhooks, pixel, S2S, manual entry).

See also

• Coupon-code attribution: the other alternative to link-only attribution.
• Manage affiliates: approval queue, affiliate lifecycle, override income shows up in the affiliate detail view.
• Sub-affiliate API: endpoint reference + webhook payload shape for override conversions.