How Spendstream works

This page describes how activity moves from your platform, through Spendstream, to suppliers and affiliate networks, and back to you as transactions, rewards and webhooks.

The flow at a glance

 
flowchart TD
    A[Publisher platform] --> B[Spendstream API or white-label storefront]
    B --> C[Gift card supplier]
    B --> D[Affiliate networks]
    C --> E[Transactions and rewards]
    D --> E
    E --> F[Webhooks and reporting]
    F --> A

The stages

1. Your platform. Your customer uses your website or app. You identify each customer with a stable identifier of your own, called the UID.
2. Spendstream. Either your own interface calls the Spendstream API, or your customer is signed in to a Spendstream hosted storefront.
3. Suppliers and networks. For gift cards, Spendstream orders the voucher from our gift card supplier. For affiliate offers, the customer follows a tracked link to the retailer and the affiliate network reports the sale back to Spendstream.
4. Transactions and rewards. Spendstream records each transaction against the user and calculates the reward according to your commission split.
5. Webhooks and reconciliation. Spendstream sends a TRANSACTION_UPDATED or USER_UPDATED webhook when a record changes. You can also read transactions from the API to reconcile.

How money flows

Commission earned on a transaction is shared according to the commercial terms agreed with you, which are stored on your publisher record. The client-commission and processing-fee fields in responses show what applies to you.

💡 Tip: Affiliate transactions are not final when they first appear. A transaction may be pending, approved, declined or amended, so treat webhooks and later reports as the source of truth rather than the customer returning to your site.

Things that behave the same on every endpoint

• Most endpoints return HTTP 200 and put the real outcome in the response field of the body (200 or 400), with a message. Always check the body.
• Response fields use kebab-case, for example brand-id and total-commission.
• Lists are paginated, with 50 items per page (100 for promotions) and previous and next links.

Related pages

• Platform overview
• Product configuration
• Authentication
• API quickstart