Summary
CHALLENGE
- Their affiliate program ran entirely on cookie tracking, and blocked cookies meant referral orders went unrecorded.
- The all-in-one platform they had used for 16 years had stopped investing in its storefront.
- Affiliates kept asking for discount codes instead of tracking links, and the old stack could not deliver them.
SOLUTION
- Moved to Shopify over the winter and imported an existing list of more than 100 affiliates into UpPromote.
- Switched promotion to coupon codes, then reworked pricing so commissions stayed affordable.
- Built three affiliate levels, with the top commission tier earned through completed education.
RESULTS
- More than 100 affiliates migrated without rebuilding the program from scratch.
- Around 20 new affiliates joined in the months after the switch.
- Program admin that used to take hours now takes minutes.
LESSONS
- Affiliates adopt the promotion method they already use elsewhere, not the one that is easiest to set up.
- In regulated categories, vetting affiliates is a compliance control, not just a quality filter.
- Commission tiers can do double duty as an incentive to learn the product.
Photonic Therapy Institute sells education first and equipment second. The company certifies light therapists in targeted light therapy, then sells the professional tools it teaches with, including torches and pad-based systems.
Its students range widely. Some are horse owners who want to help one animal. A growing share are practitioners building a clinical or mobile business. Around 80% of the market is human health, with the rest split across horses and dogs.
Founder Kay Aubrey-Chimene has worked in light therapy for 32 years. Affiliate manager Machelle Varney joined the company roughly five or six years ago, specifically to build out the referral partner program.
That program already existed and already worked. The problem was the technology underneath it.
Why did Photonic Therapy Institute leave a platform it had used for 16 years?
PTI ran on Infusionsoft for about 16 years. It was sold as an all-in-one: storefront, affiliate program, and email marketing in a single system.
Two parts of that promise broke down. The storefront stopped getting attention, and the affiliate tracking was built on a mechanism that stopped being reliable.
The affiliate program was entirely based on cookies. And of course, we have more and more problems now with cookies being blocked on track orders.
Kay Aubrey-Chimene, Founder & Executive Director of Photonic Therapy Institute
The company had moved its storefront to WooCommerce around 2019, which Kay described as another band-aid that had to be fixed. Meanwhile Infusionsoft was acquired twice, and its direction shifted away from the merchants who had built on it.
Kay had looked at Shopify a decade earlier and passed, because the fee structure at the time did not suit a catalogue with big-ticket items. Revisiting it changed the calculation, and one decision followed directly from the other.
We decided if we were going to move to Shopify, we were going to ship to a Shopify-based affiliate program. I did a ton of research, and Machelle and I both decided that we really liked the look of what you had to offer.
Kay Aubrey-Chimene, Founder & Executive Director of Photonic Therapy Institute
They moved over the winter and brought their affiliate list with them.
How did Photonic Therapy Institute give affiliates what they were asking for?
Coupon codes instead of tracking links
The loudest request from PTI’s affiliates had nothing to do with reporting or dashboards. They wanted a discount code.
Everyone wanted a simpler thing. Instead of posting links, they just wanted a coupon code to post like the rest of the world… that’s how they do social media now.
Machelle Varney, Affiliate Manager at Photonic Therapy Institute
The team had discussed it before and the option was not available on their old stack. Once Shopify made it possible, coupon tracking became the promotion method PTI leads with. Affiliates now share a code that saves the customer 10% and records the order as a referral. UpPromote has a short walkthrough on how to assign coupon codes to affiliates.
Giving affiliates the format they already understood removed the friction that had been quietly capping participation.
Reworking pricing so commissions could hold
Coupons plus commissions only work if the margin survives both. PTI spent the winter going through its pricing.
The economics hold because so much of what PTI sells is digital. Kay noted the online courses carry roughly a 97% markup, and the physical products ship with a digital education component built in. Most of the hardware is PTI’s own branded product, so the company controls its own pricing rather than working inside a supplier’s fixed margin.
That structure is what funds the program. It also explains why PTI can be generous with affiliates without discounting itself into trouble.
How does Photonic Therapy Institute decide who becomes an affiliate?
Commission tiers earned through education
PTI runs three levels of affiliates, and the highest commission level is tied to how much education a partner has completed.
The logic is practical rather than promotional. Kay pointed out that the more time, effort and money a partner invests in learning the tools, the better they get at selling and explaining them.
For years, affiliates had to be paying members to join at all. That requirement is gone, but the expectation behind it is not.
They no longer have to pay to be in it, but they have to show up, they have to get educated.
Kay Aubrey-Chimene, Founder & Executive Director of Photonic Therapy Institute
The tier structure turns training into something partners have a direct financial reason to finish.
A vetting funnel before approval
Nobody gets approved by simply asking. Applicants answer a set of questions first, and PTI treats that step as non-negotiable.
Part of the reason is quality control. The larger reason is compliance, because the products sit in health and wellness.
If affiliates don’t get some basic education, they’re making claims. Oh, use this for your cancer. You can’t do that.
Kay Aubrey-Chimene, Founder & Executive Director of Photonic Therapy Institute
Machelle is currently migrating PTI’s affiliate onboarding course out of LearnDash and into UpPromote, so training and program access live in the same place. Kay also plans to have the company’s in-house developer use UpPromote’s API to build fully custom registration pages for each of the three affiliate levels.
For a brand selling into health, the gate is the strategy.
What results has Photonic Therapy Institute seen so far?
PTI did not start from zero. They arrived with a program and needed it to survive the move.
They imported more than 100 existing affiliates into UpPromote when they launched on Shopify.
Since switching, the list has kept growing. Around 20 additional affiliates have joined in the months since, without a dedicated recruitment push.
The day-to-day workload changed noticeably too.
It’s super easy to figure out. If I’m poking around to find something, it may take me five or 10 minutes versus three hours on other platforms.
Machelle Varney, Affiliate Manager at Photonic Therapy Institute
PTI’s recruitment engine is still the same one it has run for two decades: a free public webinar every Thursday morning, one to two hours long, covering a single topic and then opening to questions. It draws 40 to 100 attendees each week, five or ten of them new, and Kay describes it as the channel that converts the most new customers.
What has Photonic Therapy Institute learned along the way?
Machelle’s summary of five years building the program comes down to a single constraint.
Trying to find the technology to be able to do what they want is the hardest part.
Machelle Varney, Affiliate Manager at Photonic Therapy Institute
Affiliates are not going to adopt a workflow because it is convenient for the merchant. They will promote in the format they already use everywhere else. The work is finding a system that supports that without forcing a rebuild every time the program changes.
For PTI, keeping 100+ existing partners intact through a platform migration mattered more than any individual feature.
