By Jimi Barkway · Published 1 September 2026 · Part of the honest manual
The short version
Your terms exist for three awkward conversations you haven't had yet: the partner bidding on your brand name, the coupon site claiming credit for your own customers, and the commission you paid on a refunded sale. Six clauses cover nearly all of it. Write them in plain English, make acceptance provable, and you'll never argue about what was agreed.
Nobody reads affiliate terms. Not yours, not anyone's. Partners scroll to the bottom and tick the box. That's fine, because terms aren't really for reading. They're for the moment money is disputed, when what matters is whether the rule existed in writing before the dispute did.
Most founders grab a template with forty clauses and no opinions. Do the opposite: six clauses with strong opinions, written like a person. Here's each one, why it earns its place, and wording you can adapt.
1. No bidding on your brand
The most expensive thing an affiliate can do to you is run search ads on your own brand name. Someone searches for you by name, already sold, and your affiliate's ad sits above your organic result. You pay a commission on a customer who was typing your name into the search bar. That's a toll booth on your own driveway.
Say it like this
You may not run paid search ads on our brand name, product name, misspellings of either, or "brand + discount / coupon / review" phrases, and you may not link ads directly to our site. Commissions from brand-bid traffic are reversed, and repeat offences end the partnership.
2. A position on coupon and deal sites
Decide now, in writing, whether coupon sites are welcome. The failure pattern is specific: a customer is mid-checkout, opens a new tab to search "your-brand coupon", clicks a coupon site, and that last-second click takes credit for a sale that was already happening. Some founders ban it outright; some allow listed coupon partners with their own codes. Either stance works. No stance is the only wrong answer, because you'll end up making the call mid-dispute.
Say it like this
Coupon, deal and cashback sites may not join without written approval. Approved coupon partners are credited through their assigned code only, not through last-click links.
3. No incentivised traffic
An affiliate who pays, rewards or enters people into a prize draw for clicking or signing up will send you conversions. They'll look wonderful for a month and churn to zero, because none of those people wanted your product. They wanted the reward.
Say it like this
You may not offer payment, rewards, points or prize entries in exchange for clicks, trials or purchases. Referred customers must be buying the product because they want the product.
4. No self-referral
The commonest small abuse in the category: a person joins your program, then buys your product through their own link, turning your affiliate program into a private discount. Say it's not allowed. Then enforce it with software rather than vigilance; we block self-referrals by default on every plan, and whatever software you use should be doing the same.
Say it like this
You can't earn commission on your own purchases, your company's purchases, or accounts you control. These are detected and voided automatically.
5. Say how attribution works
Most partner disputes come down to credit: "my reader bought, why didn't I get paid?" You defuse nearly all of them by writing the mechanics down where partners can see them: which click wins when two affiliates touched the same customer, how long the cookie window is, and that once a customer is assigned to a partner, the assignment doesn't quietly move later. Whatever your settings are (ours default to a 60-day window), the rule is: no surprises that you could have written down.
Say it like this
Referrals are tracked with a 60-day window. Where more than one affiliate referred the same customer, the most recent qualifying link before the customer creates their account is credited, and once a customer is attributed to you, they stay attributed to you.
6. What happens to the commission when the money comes back
Refunds, chargebacks and instant downgrades are normal business, and each one is a commission question. The principle that keeps it fair in both directions: the commission follows the money. Sale refunded, commission voided. That's also why your hold period exists, and why module 3 told you to set it at least as long as your refund window: it turns most clawbacks into quiet adjustments instead of asking a partner to give money back.
Say it like this
Commissions are held for [your hold period] before becoming payable. If a sale is refunded or charged back, its commission is voided; if that happens after payout, the amount is deducted from your next one.
A term nobody accepted is not a term
Here's the part templates skip entirely. When the dispute arrives, "it was on the website" is a weak position. "You accepted version 3 of these terms on 14 March, and clause 1 hasn't changed since" ends the conversation.
That means recording, per partner, the exact version they accepted and when. We stamp both on every partner at acceptance, and when you change your terms, the version changes and partners accept again. If your software can't tell you which version a given partner agreed to, you don't have terms so much as a page.
When you do need a lawyer
These six clauses plus provable acceptance cover the everyday life of a small program, and none of it is legal advice. The moment to spend an hour with an actual lawyer: a partner negotiating custom terms or exclusivity, a regulated market (finance, health, anything with disclosure rules), or serious money flowing through one relationship. One reviewed document beats ten template downloads, and it costs less than one bad dispute.
Rules written. Now the part everyone actually came for: module 3, paying people. And if you've already read it, module 4 is where the first partners come from.