Connect payment tracking: Stripe, or the API for everything else

A referral becomes revenue when the referred customer pays. For that to turn into a commission, Reditus has to see the payment. There are two ways it can, and which one you use is decided by your billing, not by preference.

Stripe

If your customers pay through Stripe, connect it directly. It is an OAuth connection: you authorise Reditus to read payments, and from then on every payment by a referred customer appears in real time and generates its commission. One requirement worth checking before you connect: the customer's email has to be present in the Stripe checkout, because that is what ties the payment to the referral.

Connect it before you invite anyone, and if you are migrating a program, on the first of a month. For a new program the day matters less, since there are no commissions yet to reconcile. What matters is that it is connected before the first referred signup can convert.

Everything else: the API

If you bill through any other processor, or through invoices, or through several systems, payments reach Reditus through the API. Two modes. Forward all payments, with the customer's email or a unique ID on each, and Reditus generates a commission only when a matching referral exists. Or ask the API first which referrals exist and send payments only for those. Working purely with unique IDs is fully supported, and it is the route larger companies choose deliberately, because no customer email ever leaves their systems.

Budget around four hours of developer time for the API path, and give the developer three things from this lesson: every call carries an idempotency key tied to the transaction, so a commission is never calculated twice; a refund sent to the refund endpoint rejects the whole commission automatically, with no partial refunds; and coupon-code tracking is a Stripe feature only, so an API setup tracks links, not codes.

Two settings to make now

Exclude the products or plans that should never earn a commission, before launch. Doing it after the first referral means explaining a clawback to an affiliate who did nothing wrong. And know the attribution rule: a customer is credited to the first affiliate who referred them, permanently. If they churn and come back, they still belong to that affiliate. Nobody gets reassigned.

If you change payment processors later, nothing in the program has to be rebuilt; the referral data already exists, and Reditus only needs to keep receiving payments from wherever they now happen.