---
title: Affiliate marketing with Payment Links
slug: affiliate-marketing-with-payment-links
published_at: 2022-03-16 17:00:44 +0000
updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:52:26 +0000
summary: 
description: ### Description In this episode, you'll learn how to use the Payment Links API with Stripe Connect to build an affiliate marketing tool. We'll show how you can pay out affiliates a portion of the proceeds when they help you make a sale.   ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev  ### Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 00:51 Creating a new affiliate user 03:09 Affiliate onboarding flow walkthrough 04:57 Creating affiliate links 11:13 Payment Links API 17:10 Conclusion   ### Resources Stripe Connect onboarding documentation - https://stripe.com/docs/connect/express-accounts Payment Links documentation - https://stripe.com/docs/payments/payment-links/api Payment Links API reference - https://stripe.com/docs/api/payment_links/payment_links/create    ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat   ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest   ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88
tags: [payments, stripe, @cjav_dev]
views: 2004
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/affiliate-marketing-with-payment-links
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytRkVL1Dm50
youtube_id: ytRkVL1Dm50
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ytRkVL1Dm50
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ytRkVL1Dm50/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Affiliate marketing with Payment Links

*Published: March 16, 2022*
*Views: 2004*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytRkVL1Dm50)

[![Affiliate marketing with Payment Links](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ytRkVL1Dm50/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytRkVL1Dm50)

## Description

### Description
In this episode, you'll learn how to use the Payment Links API with Stripe Connect to build an affiliate marketing tool. We'll show how you can pay out affiliates a portion of the proceeds when they help you make a sale.


### Presenter
CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev

### Table of contents
00:00 Introduction
00:51 Creating a new affiliate user
03:09 Affiliate onboarding flow walkthrough
04:57 Creating affiliate links
11:13 Payment Links API
17:10 Conclusion


### Resources
Stripe Connect onboarding documentation - https://stripe.com/docs/connect/express-accounts
Payment Links documentation - https://stripe.com/docs/payments/payment-links/api
Payment Links API reference - https://stripe.com/docs/api/payment_links/payment_links/create



### Support
If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat
 
### Updates
Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest
 
### Feedback
If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88

## Transcript

in this episode you'll learn how to build a basic affiliate marketing or referral marketing site using the brand new payment links api with stripe connect you might use this to create links that your affiliates can use to sell your products or services and earn a little bit of a commission we'll use stripe connect to set up affiliates so that they can accept a portion of the payment then we'll use the payment links api to create affiliate links that those affiliates will share with their audience so that ultimately when customers buy a portion of the proceeds will go into the affiliates account and the rest will go to you all right let's check out the demo [Music] so here we have a little ruby on rails application that's set up using devise for authentication if we take a look at the user model what happens is right when a user signs up so oncreate of a user model in our database we call maybe create account and what this will do is fire an api call to stripe to create a brand new express stripe connect account so it's a type express and what we're doing here is we're pre-populating a bunch of the different fields at a minimum you could just specify the type and redirect the customer using an account link to the onboarding flow but you can also pre-populate any information that you already have i have pre-filled a bunch of magic strings like address full match and a fake social security number here that will allow us to immediately verify the account but in practice you'll want to go through and have your end customers or in this case the affiliates enter in all of their data so after we create the brand new stripe account we're updating our user model and storing the id of the stripe account on the user object if we head over to the application controller we have a helper method here called require account that we can call from any controller as a before action and that will check to see if the current user has a stripe account id set up and if they do if the charges are not enabled meaning that their stripe account hasn't like fully been set up then what we do is we redirect them to an account onboarding flow so this is a stripe hosted flow for onboarding brand new connect accounts so this will walk them through setting up their express account and handle all the kyc or know your customer and aml or anti-money laundering pieces of data that need to be collected so here what we're doing is we're going to redirect that account url on sign up if they have not actually completed registering for their account so how do we actually know if these charges are being enabled on the connected account well we have a web hook handler so inside of our web hooks controller we have a basic webhook handler that is listening for the account.updated event type and when an account is updated stripe will send us a notification letting us know that the account was updated and what we're doing is we're just finding the user model in our database where the stripe account id matches the account id for the account that was just updated and then we're updating that user setting charges enabled to whatever the boolean value was for charges enabled on the account object that was sent to us from stripe okay let's go through the onboarding flow and take a look at what this looks like if we try to go directly to the root route we're redirected uh immediately and it tells us that we need to sign in so if we don't already have an account we can click sign up and here we'll just say wave 2 at cjab.dev and click sign up now once we have created an account we're going to be redirected back to that root route the root route requires that a connected account is set up for the user and the charges are enabled and if they're not then we're redirected through to this connect onboarding flow all right let's take a look at what this onboarding flow looks like so you'll notice that a lot of the personal details were already pre-populated that's because when we created the account using the api when the user was created we already pre-populated a lot of these details i'm going to enter my phone number again here now we can pick an account for payouts this is the bank account or debit card that payouts will be sent to when your affiliate shares a link and a customer purchases an item through that link in this case we're going to fill in the test card details and again this is us signing up as an affiliate all right we've got all of our details submitted and we will finalize and be redirected back to our ecommerce store all right so now we have successfully set up a user account as an affiliate and we can see several products that we could go through and purchase if we drill into each of these you'll notice that there's a buy button we can click on buy and we're redirected to the payment link through the stripe checkout flow and we can see a lot of our details in fact we're using link with stripe here so our payment details are already pre-populated but what i wanted to do was rather than buying the product what we want to do is allow affiliates to sell the product so right above this buy button let's add a new section that will either show an affiliate link for this product or if we've not created an affiliate link we'll just show a button that says sell and that will create one of these payment links that we'll be able to use so in order for us to know whether or not we can show the affiliate link or we can show the button to create a new one is to keep track of which payment links are associated with which affiliates so we needed a new model in rails that we're going to call payment link and here we'll store the stripe id for the payment link we'll store the stripe price id so each payment link will be associated with one specific price id inside of stripe you could technically set up multiple but for this demo we're just going to use one we'll also want to store the url of the payment link that's where we're going to redirect customers to and we want to keep track of ultimately which affiliate this payment link is associated with so we're going to say we're going to create a belongs to association so if we go over to the user model here and we can say the user now has many payment links we can go to the payment link and this is going to belong to the user okay the next thing we want to do is go to the product show page and where we have the current buy button instead of buy now we want to have some other section here that's going to say something like if there's a payment link then we want to show the payment link otherwise we're going to have a button that will allow us to create a payment link through the api so if there's a payment link we're just going to say we'll copy this here and we'll say that we want to actually we'll just render out the payment link and we'll call this the your affiliate link and then otherwise we're going to create a form where the action is going to go to a new controller called payment links and the method is going to be post and we're going to create a new payment link there so the data we're going to need inside the form is going to be the id of the price so we'll just call that price we're also going to need to pass in the authenticity token so that we can protect from forgery with csrf and finally we'll just have a button down here that looks just like that other button we'll call it button and it will have the same classes and instead of saying buy we'll say sell so on the products controller on the show route we need a new instance variable tracking this current affiliate and whether or not they have a payment link for this product and if they do we're going to render that payment links url otherwise we are going to show a form that will create a payment link so let's first get the form working and then after we have the form working we'll have a payment link that we can then show up here so this first block of the if statement is not actually going to work yet but let's jump over to the payment links controller so we're going to generate a new controller called payment links to start we'll just have a create action payment links controller and here we'll say create and in here what we want to do is we want to grab reference to the current price then we need to calculate the commission for the affiliate and in the future you might want to like have different commission rates for each affiliate for now we might just say like commission is i don't know 0.15 we'll give 15 to someone who sells one of our our goods then what we want to do is we want to create a new stripe payment link and finally we will store the payment link in the database associated with the affiliate all right so first to retrieve the price we're going to say the price is stripe rice.retrieve and we're going to pass in that the price id that's included from params next we want to figure out what the commission amount is going to be and so this is going to be the prices unit amount times the commission so in the case of uh this first product here this is a 70 product this is going to be something like the unit amount will be 7 000 because 7 000 is the is 70 dollars in cents so we always denote this in the integer value in the smallest currency uh in the smallest denomination for the currency and times uh 0.15 10.50 cents 10.50 is going to be the commission for this specific affiliate link next we're going to use the brand new payment link api to create a payment link so we're going to say stripe payment link.create and here we're going to pass in a few things the first is going to be some line items and the line items are going to include the price which is going to be the the price id for the price we just retrieved or we could use params price either of those will work and then we'll pass in the quantity of one now technically this is really all we need to pass but because we want to allow our customers to automatically calculate taxes collect shipping address billing address enable you know promotion codes things like that we're going to take a look at the api reference for creating a payment link and look at all the different options we have finally we're going to store this on the affiliate so we're going to say at payment link is equal to currentuser.paymentlinks.com and here we need the url that's going to be paymentlink.url we also need to pass in the stripe id that's going to be paymentlink.id stripe price id and that should be it technically you could track the commission percentage also if you wanted on the payment link it should be really just frozen in time whenever we create it so we won't be able to adjust the commission without creating a brand new payment link but that's okay finally we'll redirect back to the product path and if there's no way to redirect back we'll fall back to the products path which is really the root route we want this controller to require authentication and also require that there is an account set up so we're going to say before action authenticate user and we want to say before action require account recall that in the application controller this is our require account helper that is going to check and make sure that we have a stripe account associated with the user and that it is successfully onboarded so what are we going to actually do with this commission well let's go take a look at the api reference for creating payment links this is the documentation for creating a payment link the full api reference notice that we can pass in a price a quantity we can even pass in an adjustable quantity this will allow us to enable and even specify a minimum and maximum so maybe we want to allow our customers to control the quantity the number of furniture items they're purchasing for now we'll leave this off and assume that we want to always only sell one item just in case we run out of inventory next we could specify payment method types but it's easier to exclude this or just leave this argument out and then that will enable all of our payment method types that we've enabled from the dashboard automatically so we're just going to leave that that option out you can also specify some after completion behavior meaning after someone successfully checks out do you want to redirect them to a certain page or to do you want to keep them on the stripe hosted page and show a specific message in our case we're just going to rely on the defaults we can also enable promotion codes this is one of the arguments that we will pass application fee amount and application fee percent are two tools for moving money with stripe connect we're actually going to use transfer data instead of application fee or amount and we're going to pass the amount that we want to transfer to a destination account so the destination account in this case is going to be the affiliates stripe account and this is how we'll specify the amount that we want to pass to them so we're going to leave out application fee amount and application fee percent for this demo we can enable automatic tax we also want to enable the billing address collection and the shipping address collection since we will be sending these furniture items so we're going to have to specify a list of allowed countries all right so let's start at the top we're going to add allow promotion codes automatic tax and billing and shipping address this will automatically calculate taxes based on the location of the customer this will allow customers to enter promo codes to get discounts at checkout we'll set billing address collection to automatic so that if we need the billing address we will collect it shipping address collection requires that we pass in allowed countries and in this case we might pass in u.s and mexico and canada and a whole list of other countries but for now we'll just keep the list nice and short for the demo finally we want to specify the transfer data options so that we can pass the correct connected account id as our destination and we also want to pass the correct amount which is going to be our affiliate commission amount we want to convert this to i because all of our amounts are again specified as integers uh we need to migrate the database railsdb migrate we also need a route for our payment links controller so let's jump into the routes and add a new resources payment links only create all right let's take it for a spin so if we click on sell that should send a post request that will create a payment link to confirm that it created a payment link we can jump into the rails console and look at paymentlink.last and we see that a payment link was created and there is the url for the payment link so that all looks great the next thing we need to do is update our products controller so we're going to create a new instance variable in this show action called a payment link this will look up current user.payment links dot find by stripe price id being at price.id and if we come back to the browser and refresh the page we see your affiliate link so this is something that the affiliate might take now and send out on social media or send via email or send via sms message to their friends and when a customer goes through the process they will be able to buy this this chair uh in this case if we want to we can add a promotion code you'll also notice that sales tax is already calculated for san francisco now we can click pay and we see a thank you message thanks for your payment from the stripe dashboard under our succeeded payments we see this new successful payment for seventy six dollars and four cents this came in from the customer just now we can also see that they bought this chair but interestingly we can now scroll down and we can see that there was a transfer of ten dollars and fifty cents to this destination account so uh this connected account this express connected account which was the wave plus two at seagap dev received their cut or their their commission which was ten dollars and fifty cents or fifteen percent of the purchase so if we head back over to our products page here we could look at the list of products again and if we went to a different product maybe we want to go check out the sofa notice that we don't actually have an affiliate link for the sofa we only created a payment link for the chair so if we wanted to go and now sell this sofa we'd have to click on sell which will use the payment link api to create a brand new payment link that again is going to be associated with our affiliate account we can again go through this payment flow another really cool thing i wanted to show with link with stripe is that you now have the ability to switch between multiple different payment methods so maybe we want to use this sca test card for our payment method and when we go to checkout you'll notice that we are paying our our taxes are correctly calculated but we can complete that authentication and again we'll see this thank you page if we head back into the the demo here and look at the payments the successful payments for this connected account we've now received two commissions one was for the first chair that was the 15 percent for the first chair and now we're able to sell that sofa and we've made a hundred and forty five dollars and fifty cents or fifteen percent of that uh the sofa commission so this is pretty uh pretty powerful stuff and a great way to build a really quick uh affiliate marketing site that you can layer on top of your ecommerce solution if you haven't already we'd love for you to join us on discord if you go to discord.g stripe we have a handful of engineers who are always online happy to answer questions that you might have about your integration we're also just down to hang out and chat about your payment flows and hear your feedback about the stripe api if you found this video useful we would love a thumbs up and if you want to see content like this in the future please consider subscribing to the channel and we'll see you in the next one

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