Affiliate Programme Terms For Online Courses

Amira runs a growing online course business teaching freelance designers how to price their work. A few students love the course so much that they start recommending it, and Amira decides to offer them 20% commission for every new enrolment.

It sounds simple, until one affiliate runs paid ads using Amira's brand name, another promises students they will double their income, and a third asks for commission on a sale that was refunded two days later.

If you're setting up an affiliate or referral scheme for your online course, this is exactly where well-drafted rules can save you a lot of awkward conversations. Your affiliate programme terms set out how promoters can market your course, when they get paid, and what happens when things don't go to plan.

What Are Affiliate Programme Terms?

Affiliate programme terms are the rules your promoters agree to follow when they refer customers to your online course in exchange for commission.

You might call them an affiliate agreement, referral terms, partner terms or a course creator affiliate contract. The name matters less than the content. The key is that your affiliates know exactly what they can and can't do.

For an online course business, your terms will usually cover:

• who can join your affiliate programme
• how referrals are tracked
• when commission is earned
• how and when commission is paid
• what happens if a student asks for a refund or makes a chargeback
• what affiliates can say in ads, emails, social posts and webinars
• whether affiliates can bid on your brand name in Google Ads or other paid search campaigns
• how affiliates can use your logos, course screenshots and other brand materials
• when you can suspend or terminate an affiliate's account

These terms sit alongside your customer-facing documents, such as your website terms, online course terms, terms of sale and privacy policy. They aren't a replacement for those documents.

Do You Need Affiliate Programme Terms In The UK?

Yes, you should have written affiliate programme terms in the UK if you're paying people to promote your course.

A handshake agreement might feel friendly at the start, especially if your first affiliates are past students or people in your network. But once money is involved, small misunderstandings can turn into expensive disputes.

Without written terms, you may struggle to answer questions like:

• Did the affiliate earn commission when the student clicked their link but bought three months later?
• Can you claw back commission if the student gets a refund?
• Can the affiliate use your course name in paid search ads?
• Who is responsible if the affiliate sends spam emails?
• Can the affiliate claim your course guarantees a particular income result?

Your terms also help you manage UK advertising, consumer and privacy rules. For example, affiliate promotions usually need to be clearly identifiable as advertising under the CAP Code, which is enforced by the Advertising Standards Authority. If affiliates are sending marketing emails, the UK GDPR, the Data Protection Act 2018 and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations can also come into play.

The good news is that your affiliate terms don't need to be full of legal jargon. They just need to be clear, practical and tailored to the way your course business actually works. Generic templates often miss the details that matter most, such as refund clawbacks, prohibited bidding and the exact claims affiliates can make.

When Should You Pay Referral Commission?

You should only pay referral commission when your terms say a valid, tracked and eligible sale has happened.

This is one of the most important parts of your affiliate agreement for online courses. If you leave it vague, you can end up paying commission for sales that weren't really generated by the affiliate, or arguing over attribution when more than one promoter was involved.

Set A Clear Commission Trigger

Your terms should say what needs to happen before commission is earned. Common options include:

• Completed purchase: commission is earned when a student successfully pays for your course.
• Paid and cleared sale: commission is earned only after payment has cleared and isn't flagged as fraudulent.
• Cooling-off or refund period has passed: commission is earned after any refund period or guarantee period ends.
• Approved sale: commission is earned only after you review and approve the referral in your affiliate dashboard.

For course creators, the cleanest option is often to treat commission as payable only after the sale is paid, tracked, approved and no longer refundable under your refund policy. This gives you breathing room before money leaves your business.

Choose Your Attribution Rules

Your terms should also explain how you decide which affiliate gets credit for a sale. You might use:

• last-click attribution: the final valid affiliate link clicked before purchase gets the commission
• first-click attribution: the first affiliate link clicked gets the commission
• coupon code attribution: the affiliate's code must be used at checkout
• manual approval: you decide attribution where tracking is unclear or there's suspicious activity

You should also set a cookie window. For example, you might say a referral is valid only if the customer buys within 30 days of clicking the affiliate's link. If your course has a longer sales cycle, you may want a longer window.

Be careful with open-ended referral periods. If someone clicks an affiliate link once and buys a year later after joining your own email list and attending several of your webinars, you may not want to pay commission for that sale.

Exclude Certain Sales

Your terms can exclude referrals that don't fit your commercial model. For example, you may choose not to pay commission on:

• self-referrals by the affiliate
• sales to existing students or existing leads already in your database
• discounted or free trial enrolments
• bulk or corporate deals you negotiate directly
• orders made using unauthorised coupon codes
• fraudulent, duplicate or test transactions

Say Amira offers a 20% referral commission, but one affiliate signs up for the course using their own link to get a discount through the back door. If her terms ban self-referrals, she can reject that commission without the conversation becoming personal.

How Should Refunds And Chargebacks Affect Commission?

Your terms should say that commission can be withheld, reversed or clawed back if the underlying sale is refunded, cancelled or charged back.

This matters a lot for online courses because refunds are common, especially if you offer a satisfaction guarantee or sell to consumers. Under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013, consumers buying online may have a 14-day cancellation right in some situations. Digital content has special rules, and the position can depend on how your checkout consent and course access are set up.

The Consumer Rights Act 2015 can also be relevant if a customer says your digital content wasn't of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose or as described. Your refund policy should be consistent with these consumer rights, and your affiliate terms should work around that policy.

In practice, your referral commission terms might say:

• commission isn't payable until the refund or guarantee period has expired
• if a student receives a full refund, no commission is payable
• if a student receives a partial refund, commission is reduced to match the final amount kept by your business
• if commission has already been paid, you can deduct the clawed-back amount from the affiliate's next payment
• if there's no future payment to deduct from, the affiliate must repay the amount within a set period

Your terms of sale and affiliate terms should also cover payment plans. If your course is sold over several instalments, you may want to pay commission as each instalment is received rather than paying the full commission upfront. Otherwise, you could pay a large commission on day one and then lose money if the student stops paying.

Clarity here protects your cash flow and avoids the uncomfortable feeling of chasing an affiliate for money after a refund.

What Advertising Claims Can Affiliates Make?

Affiliates should only make advertising claims that are accurate, approved by you and supported by evidence.

When someone promotes your course for commission, their marketing can still create risk for your business. If they overpromise results, hide that they're being paid, or use misleading scarcity claims, regulators and customers may look to you as well as the affiliate.

In the UK, affiliate marketing is mainly shaped by the CAP Code and the Advertising Standards Authority. The Competition and Markets Authority also expects paid endorsements and commercial relationships to be clear to consumers. Since the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 strengthened the UK's consumer protection regime, businesses have even more reason to keep marketing claims clean and transparent.

Make Affiliate Disclosures Non-Negotiable

Your terms should require affiliates to clearly disclose when they may receive commission. This disclosure should be obvious before or at the point the customer engages with the promotion.

For social posts, that often means labels such as #ad or Ad where they're hard to miss. Vague wording like thanks to my friends at may not be enough if the commercial relationship isn't clear.

Your terms can require affiliates to follow ASA and CAP guidance, use clear labels, and keep disclosures visible across social posts, videos, blogs, podcasts, webinars and email campaigns.

Control Results And Earnings Claims

Online course promotions often go wrong when affiliates talk about outcomes. For example:

• You'll earn 10k a month after taking this course
• This course guarantees you'll get clients in 30 days
• Everyone who joins gets a job in tech
• This is the only course you need to become certified

If those claims aren't true for the average student, or you can't back them up, they can be misleading.

Your affiliate terms should say affiliates must not make claims about income, employment, qualifications, certification, health, professional accreditation or guaranteed results unless you have approved the wording in writing. You can also provide approved promotional copy so affiliates have safe language to use.

For example, instead of allowing an affiliate to say your photography course guarantees paid clients, you might approve: This course covers pricing, pitching and portfolio building for photographers who want to improve their freelance business skills.

Can Affiliates Use Email Marketing And Paid Ads?

Yes, affiliates can use email marketing and paid ads if your terms allow it, but you should set tight rules around both.

Email and paid search are powerful channels, but they can cause real problems if affiliates act too aggressively. You don't want your brand linked to spam, misleading landing pages or expensive bidding wars over your own name.

Email Marketing Rules

If affiliates send marketing emails, your terms should require them to comply with UK GDPR, the Data Protection Act 2018 and PECR. At a practical level, that means they should only email people where they have a lawful basis and any required marketing consent, identify themselves properly, and include a working unsubscribe option.

Your terms should also make clear that affiliates are responsible for their own email lists. They shouldn't use scraped lists, bought databases or your customer list unless you have a separate written arrangement covering data sharing.

If you share leads with affiliates, or they process personal data on your behalf, you may also need data processing or data sharing clauses. The right setup depends on who decides how the data is used, so it's worth getting tailored advice before exchanging customer data.

Paid Ads And Prohibited Bidding

Your terms should say exactly whether affiliates can run paid ads, and if so, what they aren't allowed to bid on.

Many course creators ban affiliates from bidding on:

• your business name
• your course name
• your founder name
• misspellings of your brand
• competitor comparison phrases using your brand
• domains that look confusingly similar to yours

This is often called prohibited bidding. It stops affiliates from competing with your own ads and paying to intercept customers who were already searching for you.

Your terms can also ban direct linking from paid ads to your checkout page. Instead, you might require affiliates to send traffic to their own approved content first, so the customer understands who is making the recommendation.

You may also want rules for coupon sites, browser extensions and deal forums. Some affiliates specialise in appearing at the last moment in the checkout journey. That may be fine for your business, or it may mean you pay commission for customers you already won. Your terms should make your position clear.

What Brand And IP Rules Should You Include?

You should give affiliates a limited licence to use approved brand materials, and nothing more.

Your course name, logo, website copy, videos, lesson materials and downloadable resources are valuable business assets. In the UK, copyright can protect original content automatically, while trade marks can protect brand names, logos and other signs if registered through the UK Intellectual Property Office.

Your affiliate terms should make clear that affiliates don't own your intellectual property and can't use it outside the programme.

Useful brand and IP rules include:

• affiliates can only use the logos, images and copy you provide or approve
• affiliates can't alter your logos, course screenshots or testimonials without permission
• affiliates can't register domains, social handles or ad accounts using your brand name
• affiliates can't create fake pages that look like your official website
• affiliates can't record, copy, resell or share your course content
• affiliates must remove your materials when the agreement ends

You can also include confidentiality obligations if you give affiliates access to launch plans, pricing strategies, conversion data or student insights. This is especially useful if some affiliates also sell their own courses or work in a related niche.

What Else Should Go In Your Affiliate Agreement?

Your affiliate agreement should cover the practical details that make the programme easy to run day to day.

Beyond commission, refunds, advertising, email marketing and brand use, you should think about the full lifecycle of the relationship.

A strong set of affiliate terms will usually include:

• application and approval: whether anyone can join or whether you approve affiliates first
• affiliate obligations: basic standards for honest, lawful and professional promotion
• payment timing: for example, monthly payments after a minimum payout threshold is reached
• payment information: what details the affiliate must provide before you pay them
• tax and invoices: who is responsible for their own tax affairs, without trying to give tax advice
• tracking errors: how you deal with broken links, cookie issues or disputed referrals
• suspension rights: when you can pause an affiliate's account while you investigate a breach
• termination rights: when either side can end the arrangement
• consequences of termination: what happens to unpaid commission, links, content and brand materials
• liability limits: how financial responsibility is managed if something goes wrong
• changes to the programme: how you can update commission rates, rules or approved marketing materials
• governing law: for a UK programme, this will often be the law of England and Wales

You should also decide how affiliates accept the terms. A click-through acceptance in your affiliate dashboard can work well, as long as the terms are clearly presented and the affiliate has to actively agree. If you're working with a larger partner, a signed affiliate marketing agreement may be more appropriate.

Try to keep your operational setup aligned with your legal terms. If your agreement says commission is paid 30 days after the end of the refund period, your finance process and affiliate software should support that. Otherwise, the document says one thing and your business does another.

Key Takeaways

• Affiliate programme terms help you set clear rules for promoters, including how referrals are tracked and when commission is paid.
• Your commission trigger should deal with approved sales, cookie windows, excluded referrals, payment plans and disputed attribution.
• Refund clawbacks are essential for online courses, especially where you offer a guarantee or sell to consumers with cancellation rights.
• Affiliates should follow UK advertising rules, clearly disclose paid promotions and avoid unsupported earnings or results claims.
• Email marketing, paid ads, prohibited bidding and brand misuse need specific rules so affiliates don't damage your reputation or compete with your own campaigns.
• Your agreement should also cover IP, confidentiality, suspension, termination, payment processes and how the terms are accepted.

If you'd like help with your affiliate programme terms, referral commission rules, advertising restrictions or data protection setup, you can reach us at 08081347754 or team@sprintlaw.co.uk for a free, no-obligations chat.