Who is this article for?
This article will be useful to you if are a vendor on PartnerStack looking for a high-level overview of integrations.
In-depth technical details can be found in our developer docs at docs.partnerstack.com
Connecting PartnerStack to your Web Application
The power of using PartnerStack comes from automatically tracking and rewarding your partners. A proper integration keeps your tracking accurate, your payouts on time, and your partners happy to promote your company.
There are two parts to integrating with PartnerStack:
- Tracking Referred Signups
- Triggering a reward
1. Tracking Referred Signups
The start of every integration with PartnerStack is also the most important step. This is the connection between a partner (referrer) and your new user (referee). This relationship is contained within a Customer in PartnerStack.
You'll give PartnerStack your Branch.io application key. When a Partner joins your program, GrowSumo will create a unique branch link for that Partner.
When traffic clicks on a Partner's link, Branch.io fingerprints the user's devices to track the referral across domains and devices.
Learn more about how to integrate with branch.io here.
Creating a customer
A Customer in PartnerStack is a referred user who has signed up to your website.
Each customer has a
- partner_key - that identifies who referred them
- customer_key - that uniquely identifies the customer. Either a unique string/number or email address.
- name - The customer's name
- email address - The customer's email
Whether you use GrowSumoJS standalone, or in conjunction with the GrowSumo API, you must create a customer to represent a referred sign up BEFORE triggering any rewards.
All rewards are connected to a customer.
2. Triggering a Reward
Now that you've created a Customer it's time to trigger a reward for the partner.
PartnerStack handles the logic and payout of your rewards, all you need to do is provide some information about the event when it occurs.
Example rewards:
- Percentage (%) of each sale made
- Flat amount ($) after a sales volume is reached
- Percentage (%) of the first sale, and flat amount for every 5 sales after.
- Flat amount ($) for a signup
- Flat amount ($) for a website review, social media share, or eBook Download
Informing PartnerStack a rewardable event has occurred
Step one is to set up some triggers in your PartnerStack account, this will tell PartnerStack what events to listen for, and what actions to carry out when they are detected. You can learn more about setting up these triggers here.
Once a trigger is set up it will activate based on the info you send to the PartnerStack API. Most commonly triggers will activate on a transaction event.
The transaction API call has two key elements:
- customer_key (required) - to identify which customer in PartnerStack and there-by attribute the reward to the correct partner
- product_key (optional) - links the request to the proper reward logic in PartnerStack
Example:product_key= "eBook" triggers a $1 reward for an eBook download.product_key= "premium" triggers a 25% reward of the purchased amount.
Learn more about Triggering a reward in the Technical docs.