How do I earn money as a creator with affiliate links?

An affiliate link is a link to a shop with an identifier that tells the shop who sent the visitor. Say you show your new jacket in a story and add a link sticker. If the shop pays per click, you earn for each tap it counts as a genuine visit. If it pays per sale, you get a commission when someone orders within a period set by the programme. That period is often called the cookie duration.

For your community, the price normally stays the same; the shop pays the commission. How the commission is calculated, for example on the net value excluding VAT and shipping, and what happens with returns is set out in each programme’s terms.

Say 400 people tap your link to the jacket in a month, five buy it for €80 net each and one sends it back. In this example the shop pays €0.02 per click and 10% of the net value, and no commission is paid on returns. All figures are assumptions, not the terms of any particular shop.

In the example, the return only costs commission; the click payments stay. If a shop only pays per sale, the first row disappears. If it only pays per click, you keep the €8. Even after the return, the sales bring in four times as much as the clicks here. That is why the link is worth most where your community is already asking where something is from, and on products you use yourself and show again and again.

• Registered trade (Gewerbe): according to the tax authorities of North Rhine-Westphalia and Bavaria, if you earn from links regularly and aim to make a profit, you usually count as running a trade. You then register it and, within a month of starting, send the tax office the tax registration questionnaire (Fragebogen zur steuerlichen Erfassung) via ELSTER. If you only earn something in individual cases, the Bavarian State Tax Office treats it as other income (sonstige Einkünfte), taxable from a total of €256 a year.
• Taxes: according to the North Rhine-Westphalia tax authorities, all income as an influencer can be taxable, including income from affiliate links. If your total turnover did not exceed €25,000 last year and does not exceed €100,000 this year, your sales are exempt from VAT under § 19(1) UStG, provided you are established in Germany. In the year you start, the €25,000 limit applies, not the €100,000 one, according to the Hessian Ministry of Finance. As a Kleinunternehmer (small business scheme) you then don’t charge VAT, unless you opt out of the scheme (§ 19(3) UStG).
• Labelling: you have to make the commercial purpose of your links clear unless it is already obvious from the circumstances (§ 5a(4) UWG). For affiliate links, Germany’s media authorities (Medienanstalten) recommend an asterisk on the link and a short explanation right next to it. If the link is part of a brand deal, add “Werbung” or “Anzeige” (advertisement).
• Terms: read the programme’s terms before you sign up. They tell you if it accepts private individuals, when and from what amount it pays out, and if you write invoices or receive a self-billing credit note (Gutschrift), a statement the programme issues for you.

On wyrld you build your own storefront with products you actually use, from more than 90,000 partner shops, including Amazon. wyrld creates the affiliate links for you, so you don’t sign up to networks yourself. You put one link to your storefront in your bio, and it covers all your products. If wyrld finds a product in several shops, your community sees the offers with prices side by side and buys directly from the shop at no extra cost.

Depending on the shop, you earn per click, per sale or both. According to its creator terms, wyrld only works with businesses within the meaning of § 14 BGB, in any legal form, including Kleinunternehmer. At the start of each month, wyrld settles the previous month with a self-billing credit note (Gutschrift), so you don’t write invoices. Commissions on sales are paid out once the shop or affiliate programme has paid them to wyrld. wyrld is free for creators and earns from the shops’ fees.