Pay others a commission to promote your event

When a teacher you trust posts about a retreat, or the person on the door at a kirtan tells the line outside that a friend recommended it, that recommendation moves people in a way an ad never does — the audience trusts the person making it, not a platform trying to sell them something. Studios, partner organizers, and enthusiastic attendees are all willing to promote an event they believe in, and they'll usually do it for a share of what they bring in rather than a flat fee. What normally kills this arrangement before it starts is the accounting: who gets credit for which sale, when someone actually gets paid, and what happens if the ticket is later refunded. BrightStar's affiliate engine handles that bookkeeping directly. Each promoter gets their own tracked link, sales made through it are attributed automatically, and the commission is recorded against the order the moment the money lands — not reconstructed later from a spreadsheet.

By default, admission, package and membership ticket types earn commission and add-ons do not. That default exists because an organizer rarely has margin to share on an accommodation room or an extra like a mat rental or a meal add-on — paying a percentage on those can quietly turn a profitable sale into a loss, especially on a multi-day retreat where the accommodation line can dwarf the admission price itself.

If that default is wrong for your event, you can name exactly which ticket tiers earn. And if you decide commission doesn't belong on a particular event at all, naming an empty set turns it off for that event only, without dismantling the affiliate programme you've built everywhere else.

When somebody follows a promoter's link, the referral is stored on their browser, and if they clicked more than one promoter's link, the most recent one wins. That covers the ordinary case: someone taps a link in a message and buys right then.

It doesn't cover a buyer who clicked the link on their phone at a kirtan and then bought later from a laptop at home, or who cleared their cookies, or who came through an in-app browser that doesn't hold onto that kind of information. For signed-in buyers, BrightStar closes that gap by also keeping a click history, and will attribute a purchase to a link clicked within the previous 30 days even when the browser record itself is gone.

The kind of link matters too: an event-specific link only attributes to a purchase of that event, while a general account link attributes to any purchase across your events. And a promoter can't earn commission by buying their own ticket through their own link — that self-referral is excluded rather than paid.

Commissions are recorded on the live payment path, at the same moment the order is confirmed, rather than pieced together afterward from a report. If an order is refunded, the commission attached to it is voided automatically, so a cancelled retreat spot or a returned festival ticket doesn't leave you owing a promoter for a sale that no longer exists.

Payouts themselves go to the promoter's own connected Stripe account. Before sending anything, BrightStar checks that the account can actually receive money — onboarding complete, charges enabled, payouts enabled. A promoter who has earned a commission but hasn't finished connecting their Stripe account doesn't lose it: the payout is queued rather than lost, and they're emailed about what's blocking it. Minimum payout thresholds apply too, so a handful of dollars in commission accumulates into a real transfer instead of generating a stream of trivial ones. Your side of all this — who's earned what, and what's been paid — lives in the commissions area of your dashboard.