Introducing SATHI: Built to Be the Companion Your Affiliate Program Never Had

At SARAL, we've worked with hundreds of brands running affiliate and ambassador programs. We know how these programs operate. We're not talking about the pitch deck version, we're talking about the Monday morning version.

What we kept seeing was this: affiliate programs that looked productive on paper but felt exhausting to run.

Programs where the revenue number grew, but so did the questions around it.

Programs where the people running them spent their week chasing leaked discount codes across coupon sites, manually writing 1099s, answering "why didn't I get credit for that sale?" emails from ambassadors who, by the way, weren't wrong to ask.

The affiliate manager had become a full-time firefighter. And the fire was partly the program's fault, and partly the platform's.

The problem with affiliate marketing was never one thing

When we dug in, the problem was always two things happening at once.

The first was visibility. Affiliate managers were making decisions with incomplete data.

Cookie-based tracking has been breaking for years,: iOS privacy updates, ad blockers, browser settings, and most platforms absorb that loss without telling you. If 30-40% of your attribution is invisible, your numbers aren't slightly off. They're structurally wrong. The CFO's question doesn't have a clean answer because the data was never clean to begin with.

The second was operations.

Affiliate marketing, as most platforms have built it, is a manual job dressed up as a software product. Payments fail. Codes leak. Commissions fire on returned orders. Ambassadors go silent because the experience of being in your program, slow payouts, generic links, no visibility into their own earnings, isn't good enough to keep them posting.

Fix the visibility problem and you can finally answer the CFO's question. Fix the operations problem and you stop losing your best ambassadors to inertia.

That's what SATHI is built to do.

‍

What SATHI looks like for creator-led Shopify brands

On affiliate attribution

SATHI combines multi-touch cookieless tracking with post-purchase surveys to give you complete visibility into your affiliate program.

• Cookieless tracking catches conversions that get dropped when privacy settings break the usual path.
• Post-purchase surveys catch influence that never shows up in click data: the podcast someone heard three weeks ago, the story a friend shared.
• Multi-touch attribution maps who introduced the customer, who nurtured the relationship, who closed the sale.

Every affiliate who influenced the sale gets credit for it. And when your CFO asks the question, you have a report built for exactly that conversation.

On affiliate code fraud

Discount codes are the most exploited surface in any affiliate program, and most platforms treat leakage as an acceptable cost. SATHI doesn't.

• Each affiliate gets a code that's structurally tied to them.
• When a code shows up on a marketplace or gets copy-pasted into a Reddit thread, SATHI surfaces it before it runs up a commission tab.
• Self-referral blocking stops affiliates from using their own codes on purchases they were already going to make.
• Refund sync automatically claws back commissions on returned orders so you're not paying out on revenue that came back.
• Suspicious order patterns get flagged in real time and not three months later when you're reconciling.

The fraud protection isn't a dashboard feature you have to remember to check. It runs in the background, all the time.

On Retention

The biggest thing we heard from affiliate managers wasn't about tracking or fraud. It was about ghosting. You recruit an ambassador, they post twice, they disappear.

SATHI gives affiliates a live dashboard of their own earnings and progress, milestones that make posting feel like it's going somewhere, and payouts that happen reliably without paperwork friction. The experience of being in your program has to be worth staying for. One affiliate who posts consistently for 12 months is worth more than 12 who each post once.

On manual boring admin

The part nobody talks about when they pitch affiliate software is the administrative weight. Payment failures. Manual invoicing. Chasing affiliates for tax paperwork in January. The back-and-forth that eats Tuesday afternoons.

SATHI handles it.

• Payments go out on schedule: automated, with auto-generated invoices so affiliates aren't waiting on paperwork.
• 1099s are generated in one click at year-end, not assembled from a spreadsheet at midnight.
• Commission triggers, bulk actions, scheduled payouts — the repetitive stuff runs on its own.
• If you're migrating an existing program, SATHI moves 500+ affiliates without disrupting payouts or breaking the relationships you've already built.
• And when you have questions that go beyond the product, you get a real human person who knows affiliate marketing.

The point isn't features. It's hours saved for you. The hours you stop spending on administration are hours you spend on the actual job.

Why this, why now

SARAL's whole job has been helping brands build long-term influencer relationships. We know what breaks affiliate programs and what makes them work.

SATHI is what we built when we decided affiliate managers deserved tools that were honest with them about what's working, what's fraud, and what's really driving new customers versus capturing demand that was already there.

Ready to Know What's Actually Working?

SATHI is live now.

Join the waitlist and start with a 14-day full-access trial. Get into the product and see what your program looks like when the data is clean.