Set the rules for your affiliate program

Website terms usually regulate visitors and customers, not affiliates earning commission for promoting your products or services. Affiliate arrangements create different legal and commercial issues, including eligibility, approval rights, referral attribution, commission exclusions, refund clawbacks, brand use rules and prohibited marketing tactics. If those points are not clearly documented, problems often arise around unpaid commissions, misleading promotions or use of your trade marks in ways you did not approve. Separate affiliate program terms give you a clearer framework for managing the program and setting enforceable rules for participants.

Affiliate program terms commonly cover who can join, how approval works, referral tracking rules, commission rates, excluded sales, payment timing, and when commissions can be withheld, adjusted or cancelled. They often also deal with refunds, cancellations, chargebacks, disclosure obligations, use of logos and brand assets, ownership of affiliate content, confidentiality, suspension rights and termination. For New Zealand businesses, the drafting may also need to address advertising conduct and consumer law risk areas. If approval steps are relevant, we will explain what needs to be prepared and what sits outside the legal work. especially where promotions cross borders or use third-party platforms.

The drafting depends heavily on how your program works in practice. Key details include what counts as a valid referral, how long attribution lasts, whether commissions are fixed or percentage based, and whether affiliates can use paid search, discount codes, email campaigns or social content. It also matters whether you run the program through a third-party platform, whether affiliates are creators, agencies or customers, and how you handle refunds or disputed sales. Privacy wording works best when it is matched to your real collection, use, storage and disclosure practices.

Usually only for a very simple program. Free templates often assume basic referral mechanics and may not properly cover your actual commission triggers, approval process, refund treatment, keyword bidding restrictions, content ownership or brand controls. They can also miss practical issues created by platform rules, cross-border affiliates or different promotional channels. Tailored terms are particularly useful where affiliates create ads, use discount codes, or access marketing assets. The aim is to give you a clearer legal framework for the issue, with final risk settings depending on your operating model and follow-through.

No. The service covers drafting or reviewing the affiliate program terms document itself, including clauses around commissions, approvals, IP protection, prohibited conduct and program administration. It does not include building your affiliate portal, configuring tracking software, monitoring affiliate activity on an ongoing basis, or clearing each ad, post or landing page before publication. It also does not cover regulator approval or third-party platform decisions. If you need related documents, such as influencer agreements or brand partnership terms, those would usually be handled as separate work.

Just submit an enquiry via this page or click the 'get started' button on our website to submit an enquiry. After you've submitted an enquiry, one of our legal consultants will review your enquiry within 1 business day and get in touch to get a better idea of exactly what you are looking for.

Then your legal consultant will send through an email with a bit more information about the services you need, along with a fixed fee quote setting out costs, scope of the service and timing. Have a read through it, and if you're happy with the scope, you can accept and sign our engagement letter online - easy!

Once you've formally accepted, we'll connect you with a specialist lawyer and they will work with you to complete your project. They will contact you by email or phone if they need to get in touch.

Sprintlaw works on fixed-fee pricing wherever possible, so you can review the scope and cost before you decide whether to proceed. For the Affiliate Program Terms service, pricing starts from $900.00.

After you enquire, a legal consultant will confirm what is included, the expected timing and whether any extra work is needed before you engage us.

We operate completely online, which means we can help you wherever you are in New Zealand. We have office spaces in Sydney, and in Melbourne, but our use of technology allows our team members to work remotely from around the world. Our legal team are mostly based in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. We also have a London office for Sprintlaw UK.

Our legal team is made up of experienced lawyers, who are specialists in various areas of law and hold an Australian legal practising certificate. None of our Sprintlaw lawyers are New Zealand qualified lawyers and they do not currently hold a New Zealand practising certificate.

They provide legal services working remotely from Australia via our 'legal consultancy' model, through which (under section 6 and section 35 of the New Zealand Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006) our Australian legal team are permitted to provide legal services to New Zealand businesses provided they do not provide services in certain 'reserved' areas of law. You can read our FAQ page to learn a bit more about our 'legal consultancy' model.

Given the strong similarities between Australian and New Zealand law, and the areas of law in which we practice (being small business and startup law), we do not view the fact that our lawyers have not qualified in New Zealand as having any substantive impact on the quality of our service. We are committed to ensuring that we provide high quality, affordable legal services to all our New Zealand clients.

Our legal team have all trained at leading firms, but have left the traditional corporate law world to join us on our mission to create a new and better way of delivering legal services. They have specialist expertise in technology law, intellectual property law, contract drafting and review, corporate law and commercial law.