How the marketplace works, in plain language

Create a vendor account, confirm your email, complete your business profile and upload verification documents. The marketplace team reviews the business; once approved you can publish products and activate partner programs.

Every vendor on the public marketplace has passed a manual business review (business profile and documents) by the marketplace team before its products and programs could go live. A separate “Verified domain” badge appears only when the vendor has also proved control of its web domain with a DNS TXT record.

From their own backend, through a signed integration API: payments, renewals, refunds and chargebacks are sent server-to-server with an API key and an HMAC signature, and every event is idempotent. Commissions are created only from payments reported this way.

Everything about the program: who is approved, the commission rules and caps, cookie window, deal protection period, hold period, traffic policy, coupons issued, and which deal registrations to approve. Vendors approve commissions before they can be paid.

Rules are versioned: a change creates a new version, and each commission records the version it used. Some programs also lock the terms that applied at a customer’s first sale for the life of that customer.

No. Customers buy from the vendor and pay the vendor directly, on the vendor’s own invoice. The marketplace only receives the vendor’s confirmation of the payment to calculate commissions.