Set up your first reseller program

Documentation Index

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A reseller program is bigger than an affiliate program. Affiliates earn a commission for referring buyers to your shop. Resellers sell your products through their own storefronts, channels, or APIs, with their own pricing. This playbook walks through enabling the program, configuring it, inviting your first reseller, and understanding the two operating modes.

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Affiliate vs. reseller — when to use which

Affiliates extend your reach. Resellers extend your reach and build their own business on top of your catalog. Different commercial relationships.

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Step 1 — Enable the reseller program

The program is off by default on every shop. Enable it from your dashboard at Customers → Resellers (/customers/resellers). You’ll configure:

• Enabled — flip on.
• Default mode — AFFILIATE or WHOLESALE. This is the mode applied to new resellers unless you override per-reseller. Most starts go with AFFILIATE mode first, switch individual ones to WHOLESALE later as relationships develop.
• Default commission percent — for affiliate-mode resellers, what cut of each sale they earn.
• Default wholesale discount percent — for wholesale-mode resellers, the discount off list price they buy at.
• Minimum payout threshold — minimum balance before a reseller can request a payout.
• Require verification — toggle if you want to manually approve every reseller before they can transact.
• Terms URL — optional URL to your reseller agreement.

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Step 2 — Invite your first reseller

Resellers join by invitation only — there’s no public signup form. From the resellers page:

1. Click Invite reseller.
2. Enter the recipient’s email.
3. Optionally set an expiry on the invite link (default is a few days).
4. Send.

The invitee receives an email with a link to /invitations/[token] on the reseller portal. They accept, create their reseller-portal login, and they’re in. If you have Require verification on, they’re in “pending” state until you approve from your dashboard. Otherwise they’re active immediately.

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Step 3 — Understand the two modes

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Affiliate mode

The reseller gets a referral link to your shop. Buyers land on your storefront, pay you directly. The sale is attributed to the reseller and they earn the configured commission percent. This is mechanically the same as the customer-affiliate program (see Customers → Affiliates), but the reseller relationship has its own profile, lifecycle (invited, active, suspended, terminated), and balance.

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Wholesale mode

The reseller buys stock from you at wholesale price, then resells through their own channel. Two sub-flows:

• Stock transfers — you transfer a chunk of inventory (e.g. 100 license keys) to the reseller at the wholesale price. The transfer creates an internal invoice for the reseller to pay. Once paid, the keys move from your pool to theirs.
• Auto-fulfillment — instead of pre-buying stock, the reseller’s storefront orders pull live from your supplier inventory. The reseller’s buyer pays the reseller, the reseller’s account is charged the wholesale price, and you deliver from your pool. This is the “drop-ship” pattern.

Either way, the reseller decides their own retail price; their margin is what they charge minus the wholesale they paid you.

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Step 4 — Reseller-portal tour

Your reseller logs in at the separate reseller portal (a different URL from your main dashboard — they don’t see your shop’s data). Their dashboard has:

• Overview — sales, balance, recent activity.
• Links & Embeds — referral links and embeddable widgets they drop into their own websites with <script> tags.
• Auto-Fulfill (Listings) — products they’ve listed, with their pricing.
• Sales — their order history.
• Stock — inventory they own (wholesale-mode only).
• Payouts — request and track payouts to their gateway / wallet.
• API — generate API keys scoped to fulfillments.read/write and balance.read. Used when they’re building their own integration.

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Step 5 — Manage from your side

Back in your Customers → Resellers, each reseller has a row with:

• Current balance, total sales, status (active / pending / suspended / terminated).
• Analytics per reseller — sales count, revenue contributed.
• Mode and commission override per reseller (e.g. one strategic reseller on 35% commission while default is 20%).
• Approve / reject pending payout requests.
• Suspend (temporary block from new sales) or terminate (permanent cutoff).

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Common questions

“Can a customer also be a reseller?” Yes. The same person can hold a customer account on your shop and a separate reseller relationship — they’re distinct profiles linked by the same email. “Can a reseller have multiple stores connected to the same upstream?” They have one reseller relationship per shop they’re working with. To work with multiple upstream shops, they’re invited separately by each. “Stock transfers don’t fit my product.” That’s normal — physical-inventory style stock transfers only make sense for limited-pool products like serials/license keys. File-based products and subscriptions work in auto-fulfillment mode where there’s no stock to transfer.