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Cobalz Affiliate

Quickstart

This walk-through gets you from a fresh Cobalz account to a fully tracked commission in about 15 minutes. We'll assume you have a WooCommerce store; the Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, and Stripe variants are linked at the end.

1. Create a merchant account

Go to /signup, pick a slug for your program (this becomes the URL of your affiliate portal at /a/your-slug), and confirm your email. You land on the Free plan with 25 affiliate seats and unlimited tracking events.

2. Install the WooCommerce plugin

  1. From your WordPress admin go to Plugins → Add New → Upload.
  2. Download the plugin ZIP from your merchant dashboard › Settings › Store connection.
  3. Upload + activate. You'll see a new top-level menu: Cobalz Affiliate.
  4. Click it, enter the pairing code from your dashboard, save.

Within 60 seconds your dashboard's green-dot status indicator flips from Pending to Connected. If it doesn't, see the WooCommerce troubleshooting section.

3. Drop in the tracker

Add this one line to your storefront — anywhere before </body> (the plugin can inject it for you under Plugin Settings → Inject tracker):

<script async
  src="https://affiliate.cobalz.com/t.js"
  data-merchant="<YOUR_MERCHANT_UUID>"
  data-merchant-slug="<your-slug>"
></script>

That ships a 2.7 KB beacon that captures ?ref= parameters, writes a 90-day first-party cookie, and fires a click event to /api/t/click. Full options: tracker docs.

4. Approve your first affiliate

  1. Share the affiliate signup URL: https://affiliate.cobalz.com/a/your-slug/signup
  2. An applicant fills out the form and lands in Approval queue on your dashboard.
  3. Click Approve. They get an email; an affiliate.approved webhook fires; if you've enabled Slack, your team sees a message.
  4. Auto-coupon is on by default — Cobalz creates a personal discount code in WooCommerce for the new affiliate and stamps it on their account.

5. Watch the first commission land

Have the affiliate share their link (or their coupon) and place a test order. Within seconds:

  • The order arrives via the WC plugin's outbox.
  • Cobalz resolves attribution (cookie → coupon → URL param, in that order).
  • A commission row is inserted with status pending and a hold period (default 30 days, matches your refund window).
  • The affiliate sees pending earnings in their portal at /a/your-slug/dashboard.

At /m/<slug>/commissions you'll see the new row with the winning rule and amount. The daily approve-holds cron auto-promotes it to approved after the hold; the monthly payouts cron then drafts a Mercury invoice (or PayPal / Stripe / Wise, depending on the affiliate's preference).

Note:You can shorten the hold period for testing: Settings → Payouts → Hold period. Set it to 0 days to make new commissions immediately payable.

Where to go next