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Blink provides three distinct mechanisms for revenue sharing and money movement. Because they serve different purposes, choosing the right one is critical for your application’s architecture.

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1. Affiliates (Referral Marketing)

Best for: Creators, influencers, and marketers who refer customers to your store. The Affiliate system is designed for referral links. When a customer clicks an affiliate link (?via=code) and makes a purchase, Blink automatically calculates the commission and attributes the sale to the affiliate.
  • Commission: Fixed amount or percentage per sale.
  • Payouts: Managed centrally by the merchant via PayPal, Wise, or manual payouts (or automatically via Stripe Connect if configured).
  • Dashboard: Affiliates get their own dashboard to generate links, view clicks, and track conversions.
When to use it: You want to pay people for sending traffic to your store.

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2. Splits (Collaborator Revenue)

Best for: Co-creators, business partners, or joint ventures. Splits allow you to automatically divide revenue for a specific product across multiple Blink accounts. If you co-authored an ebook with another creator, you can set a 50/50 split on that specific product.
  • Trigger: Applies to every sale of the connected product automatically (no referral link needed).
  • Payouts: Payouts are transferred automatically to the collaborator’s Blink account balance.
  • Visibility: Collaborators can see the sales of the split product in their own Blink dashboard.
When to use it: You co-created a product with a partner and want to automate the revenue split forever.

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3. Payees (Multi-Vendor Marketplaces)

Best for: Headless marketplaces, platforms, and aggregators where sellers own the product. Payees is our deepest API integration designed for Stripe Connect multi-vendor platforms. Instead of simply referring a sale (Affiliate) or splitting revenue (Splits), a Payee is the actual seller of record.
  • How it works: When generating a checkout session via the API (POST /v1/checkouts), you pass a payee_id (the Stripe Connect account of your vendor) and an application_fee_amount (your platform’s cut).
  • Payouts: The money flows directly into the Payee’s Stripe account at checkout, minus your application fee. You never hold the funds.
  • Headless Only: Payees are managed entirely via the API and do not get a Blink dashboard.
When to use it: You are building a custom marketplace (like an AI tool directory or a course platform) where users list and sell their own products on your frontend, and you take a platform fee.