Kirtan leaders, retreat teachers, yoga studios, and longtime attendees often do more to fill a room than any paid ad — a teacher tells their own list, a studio posts to their community, a past attendee shares the link with their sangha. BrightStar's affiliate system turns that word-of-mouth into something trackable: each promoter gets their own referral link, every click and sale tied to that link is logged automatically, and the commission owed gets paid out through Stripe without anyone having to tally sales by hand. This matters most for organizers running retreats or festivals with a wide circle of teachers, volunteers, and partner studios, where a handful of promoters might be responsible for most of the door.
How a referral link is built
Every affiliate link follows the same pattern: your event's normal URL with a `?ref=` parameter appended, holding that affiliate's code — for example, brightstarevents.com/events/sunrise-yoga/retreat?ref=SARAH. Because the code sits on the same URL as the event page itself, the link still opens straight into your event listing; nothing about the buyer's experience changes, only the code that rides along in the background. For situations where a long URL is awkward — a printed flyer at a kirtan door, a bio link on social media — BrightStar also generates a short version on the bstar.events domain that carries the same ref code. Either form triggers the same tracking once someone clicks it.
What happens between a click and a paid commission
When someone clicks an affiliate link, BrightStar sets a 30-day attribution cookie and logs the click against that affiliate's code, along with the referring and landing URLs and an order ID once a purchase follows. Attribution is last-click: if a buyer clicks two different affiliates' links before buying, whichever click happened most recently gets the credit. Because tracking is cookie-based rather than tied to an account, it does not follow a single buyer across devices — a click on a phone and a purchase later from a laptop will not connect. A purchase is also never attributed to the buyer's own affiliate account, closing the obvious loophole of an affiliate simply buying their own ticket to earn a commission on it. A purchase only counts toward commission if it happens within that 30-day window, and orders using a discount code can optionally be excluded from earning commission at all. Commissions themselves are recorded against the order, not just the click, which is what lets an organizer re-run reporting without ever creating a duplicate payout for the same sale.
Choosing how affiliates get paid per sale
BrightStar supports three ways to structure what an affiliate earns: a straight percentage of the ticket price, typically somewhere in the 5–20% range; a flat dollar amount per ticket sold; or a tiered percentage that increases as an affiliate sells more, so a promoter moving real volume earns a better rate than someone who sells the occasional ticket. A typical tiered setup pays 10% for an affiliate's first 1–10 sales, 12% from 11–25, and 15% from 26 sales onward, so as a partner studio or teacher scales up their promotion, their share scales with it. Which ticket types actually earn commission is configurable rather than automatic. Left at the default, admission, package, and membership tickets earn while add-ons like accommodation do not, since that margin usually isn't the organizer's to share with a promoter. You can name specific ticket types to override that, and setting an empty list turns commission off entirely. Free tickets never generate a commission regardless of configuration, and on a percentage structure, only the eligible portion of a mixed order counts toward the payout.
How and when the money actually moves
A commission isn't available to pay out the moment it's earned. It sits in a pending state until the event itself has actually finished, which gives the refund window time to pass before any money changes hands — protecting you from paying out on a ticket that gets refunded a week later. Once a commission is released, the payout runs as a direct Stripe transfer from your own connected account to the affiliate's; it never passes through a BrightStar balance, and it's blocked outright if the affiliate hasn't connected a Stripe account able to receive transfers. Payouts follow a monthly schedule by default, though you can also run them manually, and each affiliate needs to reach a $25 minimum before a payout goes out. If a ticket tied to an affiliate is refunded before that commission has been paid, the commission is cancelled.
What your affiliates can see
Every affiliate has their own dashboard inside BrightStar, and the view is broken out per event rather than as one blended total, so a teacher promoting two different retreats can see exactly how each one is performing on its own. Each commission also carries a status — pending, available, requested, paid, or waiting on a connected Stripe account — so an affiliate always knows where a given sale stands. From that dashboard, an affiliate can see:
- Total clicks on their link
- Conversions (with order details)
- Commission earned
- Pending vs. paid commissions
- Payout history
- Performance by event