How Affiliate Tracking Works
Every commission depends on a chain of small steps between a click and an order. Here is each step and where it can break.
The chain in full
Affiliate tracking sounds like one thing but is really five, and a commission only exists if all five succeed. Understanding the chain is worth the ten minutes because it tells a merchant what to check when a sale is missing, and it tells an affiliate why a sale they are sure they sent did not appear.
- An affiliate generates a link for a product. The link carries a short code that identifies that affiliate and that product together.
- A visitor clicks it. The click is recorded and the visitor is redirected on to the merchant's store.
- A small script on the merchant's storefront stores the click reference in the visitor's browser.
- The visitor buys, either immediately or days later.
- The merchant's store reports the order, the stored reference is matched back to the affiliate, and a commission is recorded.
Step two, the redirect
Decolinker's links redirect through a dedicated short domain rather than through the main site. The redirect writes the click to the database and appends a reference parameter to the destination URL before sending the visitor onward. It is a single hop and adds no visible delay.
Using a separate domain for links is a deliberate choice, not decoration. Affiliate links end up in published YouTube descriptions and posts that can never be edited afterwards, so the domain carrying them is kept isolated from anything that could get it blocked or reputationally damaged elsewhere.
Step three, the storefront script
The script reads the reference parameter on the visitor's first arrival and stores it in that browser. It does not change how the store looks or behaves, and it does not follow the visitor anywhere else. On the supported platforms the script is installed automatically when a merchant connects their store, so there is nothing to paste.
This is the step that fails most often, and it fails silently. If the script is not present on the page the visitor lands on, the reference is never stored, and the sale that follows is a normal untracked sale. The merchant keeps the revenue and the affiliate gets nothing, with no error anywhere to explain it. That is exactly why the integration page has a check button that loads the storefront and confirms the script is really there.
The attribution window and its real limits
Most affiliate networks quote an attribution window of thirty days, and Decolinker aims for the same. It is worth knowing that this number is an intention rather than a guarantee, because browsers, not networks, decide how long a stored reference actually survives.
What actually limits the window
- Safari caps script-set storage at roughly seven days, so a Safari visitor who buys on day ten is not matched.
- A visitor who clicks on their phone and buys on a laptop is two different browsers, so the reference does not travel with them.
- A visitor who clears their browsing data between the click and the purchase clears the reference with it.
- Private or incognito windows discard the reference when the window closes.
None of these are fixable by any affiliate network, and any network claiming a guaranteed thirty day cookie across all browsers is describing a world that stopped existing several years ago. The honest version is that most conversions happen within a couple of days of the click, and the tail beyond that is real but smaller than the headline number suggests.
Step five, reporting the order
There are two ways a sale reaches Decolinker. On a connected platform that supports it, the store sends the order automatically the moment it completes, which needs nothing from the merchant. Where that is not available, the merchant adds a small snippet to their order confirmation page, or has their backend call the Decolinker API when an order completes.
Repeated reports of the same order are ignored, so a platform that retries a delivery cannot create a duplicate commission. This matters more than it sounds: retries are normal, and a network that counted them twice would over-bill the merchant and over-pay the affiliate on the same sale.
Refunds and the validation window
A recorded commission is not immediately payable. A sale can be refunded or charged back after the fact, and paying commission on a sale that later reverses means clawing money back from an affiliate who has already spent it. So a confirmed sale sits through a refund window first, and only afterwards does the commission become validated and enter a payout cycle.
What each side should check
- Merchants: that the tracking check passes on your live storefront, and that it still passes after a theme change or a site rebuild, which is when it silently disappears.
- Affiliates: that clicks are appearing in your dashboard. Clicks arriving with no sales is a conversion problem; no clicks at all means the link itself is not being used.
For how the money is split once a commission is recorded, see how the platform fee works.