Your affiliate program doesn’t live in a vacuum. It touches your CRM, your data warehouse, your Slack channels, your custom dashboards, and the dozen internal tools your team checks every morning. Until now, keeping all of those systems in sync with Refersion meant polling our API on a timer, writing glue code to spot what changed, and accepting a lag between “something happened” and “your systems knew about it.”
Today that changes. We’re launching our improved real-time webhooks in Refersion; a fast, secure, self-serve way to get program events pushed to your systems the moment they occur.
What webhooks actually do for you
A webhook is a message Refersion sends to a URL you own, automatically, whenever something important happens in your program. Instead of asking “anything new yet?” over and over, your systems simply get told.
The practical payoff:
- Onboard affiliates faster. When someone applies or gets approved, kick off your welcome sequence, provision assets, or notify a partnerships manager instantly.
- Keep finance in the loop. Route conversion and payout events straight into your accounting or reconciliation workflows.
- Power live dashboards. Feed conversions into your BI stack as they land, no nightly batch job required.
- Automate the busywork. Trigger Slack alerts, Zapier flows, or internal tooling off any program event without babysitting a cron job.
The events you can subscribe to
You choose exactly which events matter to you. At launch, Refersion can notify you when:
- A conversion is created, approved, or denied; track sales and their review status in real time
- A payout is created – sync commission payments as they happen
- An affiliate is created – trigger onboarding the instant someone joins
- An affiliate’s status changes – react to approvals, denials, and removals
- An affiliate updates their details – keep your records current automatically
- A promotion method is registered – know the moment an affiliate adds a coupon, email, or SKU
- An affiliate reaches a new bonus tier – celebrate and reward top performers on cue
The full event catalog, right inside Settings → Integrations → Webhooks.
Set it up in minutes, no engineering ticket required
Everything is self-serve. Head to Settings → Integrations → Webhooks and you’ll find a management portal built right into your dashboard. From there you can:
- Add an endpoint — the URL where you want events delivered
- Pick your events — subscribe each endpoint to only the event types it cares about
- Go live — Refersion starts delivering immediately
Manage all your endpoints and monitor their delivery health from one screen.
Adding an endpoint takes seconds: paste a URL, check the events you want, and hit Create.
Want two destinations with different event sets, one for finance and one for your growth team? Add as many endpoints as you need, each with its own subscription.
Built to be secure by default
Because webhooks send your program data to external URLs, we designed the system to be verifiable and tamper-evident from day one:
- Signed payloads. Every delivery is signed with an HMAC-SHA256 signature so your endpoint can cryptographically confirm the message genuinely came from Refersion and wasn’t altered in transit.
- Rotatable signing secrets. Each endpoint has its own secret you can view and rotate anytime, straight from the portal.
- Replay protection. Every message carries a unique ID and a timestamp, letting you reject stale or duplicated requests and shut down replay attacks.
Reliable delivery you don’t have to think about
Networks hiccup. Servers go down for maintenance. A good webhook system handles that and ours does:
- Automatic retries. If your endpoint is briefly unreachable, Refersion retries delivery on a smart backoff schedule instead of dropping the event.
- Full delivery history. Inspect every attempt and its outcome right in the portal, so debugging is a matter of looking, not guessing.
- One-click replay. Had an outage or shipped a fix? Replay any failed delivery on demand.
- No duplicates. Each business event carries a stable identity, so a given event is delivered once, your systems won’t double-count a sale or fire an onboarding flow twice.
Every delivery attempt is logged, so you can inspect exactly what was sent and replay anything that failed.
Ready for your developers
If you have an engineering team, they’ll feel right at home. The payloads are documented with an OpenAPI specification covering every event type, its schema, and realistic examples, so building and verifying an integration is straightforward, and signature verification takes just a few lines using standard HMAC libraries.
Get started today
Real-time webhooks are available now on qualifying Refersion plans. Open Settings → Integrations → Webhooks, add your first endpoint, and start building automations that react to your program the instant it moves.
If webhooks aren’t on your current plan, you’ll see an upgrade option on that same page, reach out to our team and we’ll help you find the right fit.
Your program is generating meaningful events every day. Now you can put every one of them to work, the moment it happens.
