The single most important setting in your affiliate program is one number: the commission. Set it too low and creators quietly skip your offer. Set it recklessly high and you erode the margin the whole model is supposed to protect. This guide walks through how to find your number — not a magic figure, but a method you can defend with your own accounts.
Percentage or fixed dirham amount?
There are two ways to pay per approved sale:
- A percentage of the order value — say 10% of every sale a creator’s code generates. This is the default for retail: it scales with basket size, so a creator who inspires a big order earns more, and you pay in proportion to revenue.
- A fixed AED amount per sale — say AED 50 per completed booking. This fits services, subscriptions and anything where “order value” is fuzzy or where your unit economics are the same regardless of basket.
Most UAE stores selling physical products should start with a percentage. Fixed amounts shine when your average order barely varies, when you sell one hero product, or when a percentage of a small basket would round to pocket change and motivate nobody.
Your ceiling: three numbers from your own books
Before looking at what anyone else pays, work out what you can afford. Three inputs set the ceiling:
- Gross margin. If you make 55% gross margin, a 15% commission still leaves room. If you make 20%, it does not. The commission must fit inside the margin with space left for your other costs.
- Average order value. A 10% commission on an AED 400 basket pays a creator AED 40 per sale — worth their effort. The same 10% on an AED 60 basket pays AED 6, and few creators will build content around that. Low AOV usually means you need a higher percentage or a fixed amount to make each sale meaningful.
- Repeat-purchase rate. If a typical new customer comes back and buys again, the first sale is worth more than its own revenue. Stores with strong repeat behaviour can afford to be generous on the first order, because the commission is really buying a customer, not a transaction.
The honest framing: commission is your customer acquisition cost, paid only on success. Compare it with what a customer costs you through ads — for most stores, an approved-sale commission is the cheaper of the two, and it is certainly the safer.
Rules of thumb by category
Treat these as starting points, not promises — your margin decides, not the category label:
- Fashion, beauty, accessories: often 10–20%. Margins support it, creators love visual products, and competition for their attention is real.
- Home, lifestyle, gifts: commonly 8–15%.
- Food, supplements, consumables: often 10–15%, helped by repeat purchases.
- Electronics and appliances: usually 5–8%. Thin margins cap the rate — but high order values keep the per-sale payout attractive anyway.
- Services and bookings: typically fixed AED amounts per completed booking rather than a percentage.
Why a too-low rate quietly fails
Creators choose between offers the way you choose between suppliers. A creator with an engaged audience sees your 4% next to a competitor’s 12% and does the arithmetic in seconds. The failure mode is silent: nobody complains, nobody negotiates — they simply promote someone else. You will not see a rejected offer in any dashboard; you will see zero activity and conclude, wrongly, that affiliate “doesn’t work” for your store.
The per-sale payout in dirhams is what a creator actually feels. Before publishing a rate, compute it: rate × your average order value. If that number would not motivate you to make a Reel, it will not motivate them.
The launch tactic: start generous, adjust with data
You do not have to guess right on day one. A sensible sequence:
- Launch at the generous end of what your margin allows — this is your offer to the founding cohort of creators, and first impressions decide who bothers to try you.
- Let the data accumulate for a couple of months: which creators sell, what the real return rate is, what a converted customer goes on to spend.
- Adjust openly. Because you only ever paid for approved sales, even your “too generous” phase was profitable on every order it touched. Trimming a rate later is a normal, explainable move; raising one is a pleasant surprise.
Contrast this with fixed ad spend, where a mis-judged launch budget is simply gone. A mis-judged commission rate costs you a few extra points on sales you actually made. That asymmetry is why commission-only is the forgiving place to experiment.
The short version
- Percentage for retail, fixed AED for services and flat unit economics.
- Ceiling = what your gross margin, AOV and repeat rate genuinely support.
- Sanity-check the per-sale payout in dirhams from a creator’s point of view.
- Launch generous, measure, then adjust — the model forgives errors in a way ad budgets never do.
LinkSouk lets UAE stores set a percentage or fixed AED commission per creator campaign, and you approve every sale before paying. Join the advertiser waitlist to set your first rate with the founding cohort.