Referral journey
Apex Raceway refers Alex. Alex buys from Delta Racing; Apex earns a share of the RaceTeams fee.
How the systems connect
Current actions are highlighted. Scroll sideways on smaller screens.Money at this step
Seller shareRaceTeams retained feePartner commission
System flow & technical details
What people see
What we implement
Most vendor questions are answered. The main remaining choice is when the customer’s 12-month period should start.
When does the 12-month period start?
Tapfiliate’s native cap starts at the first successful purchase. The original request starts at signup.
This demo uses 365 days and signup within the initial 90-day window. Confirm the production duration and how a new referral works after expiry.
Capture → Pending → approval
Record the sale after payment capture. Approve the commission after completion and the agreed refund hold. Fully refunded sales are disapproved.
Automatic approval stays off. Booking preauthorization is not capture. Partial refunds are deferred.
Tapfiliate applies the rate.
RaceTeams sends the fee and category. Tapfiliate applies the category’s partner-group override.
10% is illustrative, not an agreed rate. Group and category rates are not added together.
Client review checklist
- Period: native first-conversion cap or custom signup-based cap?
- Eligibility: which fees/categories qualify? Are existing users or self-referrals eligible?
- Competing referrals: first or latest partner before signup? Keep the account-linked partner for the earning period?
- Approval: how long after completion? Hold approval while a refund or dispute is unresolved?
- Reversals: remove commission on full cancellation/refund even if RaceTeams retains a fee? Offset already-paid commissions against future earnings?
Planned payouts: monthly, with a $100 minimum. Assign responsibility for settlement and reconciliation.
To confirm with Tapfiliate
- After the customer cap expires, how can a new partner referral receive attribution for that customer?
- If the first conversion is refunded or disapproved, does the cap start date change? Which conversion starts the cap when earlier purchases were excluded?
- Do later changes to group/category rates affect existing Pending commissions or historical reversals?
These are vendor behavior checks, not settled program rules. Reliable chargeback-event access also needs verification.
Build and test before launch.
Capture referrals from the start; earlier attribution may be impossible to reconstruct later. Existing seller Stripe Connect payouts stay in place.
One launch package · 36–50 development hours
Plan for approximately 44 hours. Includes the complete agreed referral-to-payout lifecycle, real-account testing and deployment verification.
Active engineering hours; vendor replies, bank activation and funding delays are not included.
Included
- Verified referrals, customer association and fee-based conversions.
- Event worker, durable records, retries and duplicate protection.
- Pending commissions, approval hold, full refunds and cancellations.
- Partner groups, category rules and accessible chargeback events.
- Native Trolley setup, monthly payout checks and reconciliation.
Deferred / separate scope
- Partial refunds and partial commission adjustments.
- Seller recruitment, Trolley Tax and onboarding 100–200 partners.
- Custom reporting, multi-currency rules and new refund processes.
- Custom expiry/reassignment or special chargeback infrastructure.
Estimate assumes native first-conversion attribution, standard reporting, one program/currency, required account access and straightforward worker/database hosting. Attribution priority, approval holds and reversal policies still need agreement. The 36–50-hour estimate remains provisional; custom behavior required by the answers will be scoped separately. No core transaction-process change is proposed.
Required before implementation
Confirm the fee basis, attribution policy, eligible categories, approval hold and reversal rules; provide Tapfiliate/Sharetribe account access; verify worker hosting and event permissions. These checks are included in the launch package.
Only a confirmed need for custom expiry/reassignment, a new payment process or special event-access infrastructure will become separate scope. We will identify and estimate it before proceeding.
Hour breakdown & dependencies
- Access and rules: 4–6 h
- Referral and customer linking: 6–8 h
- API, worker and durable jobs: 8–12 h
- Commission lifecycle: 6–10 h
- Account testing and operations: 12–14 h
One complete launch package; the breakdown above describes internal work, not separate deliverables. A custom signup-based cap may add 6–12 hours only if the agreed policy requires it, subject to the confirmed API workflow.
Original requirement checklist
Reference
Attribution
Which partner referred the customer. The initial 90-day click window and the customer earning cap are separate.
Conversion vs commission
The conversion amount is the RaceTeams fee; the commission is the partner’s share. $150 × 25% = $37.50.
Pending → approved → paid
Pending waits for checks. Approved can enter settlement. Paid requires a successful transfer and payout eligibility.
Capture
Capture collects funds. Preauthorization only reserves them.
API endpoints & backend terms
Worker: background event processor. Cursor: last safely recorded event sequence. Retry: recover a failed call. external_id: the Sharetribe transaction ID; returned Tapfiliate IDs identify records to update.
REST v1.6 · https://api.tapfiliate.com/1.6 · X-Api-Key over HTTPS. Keys stay on the server; this page makes no API calls.
Sources
Client-supplied Tapfiliate Emails 1–4, plus the client’s decision to defer partial refunds.
- Tapfiliate REST API · Referral integration
- Refunds and commissions · Native Trolley setup
- Sharetribe events · Sharetribe refunds
Trolley access requires Scale and the first subscription payment. Examples omit taxes, FX and payment fees. The cap duration and special-category rate are illustrative.