How a sale gets attributed to a creator

"Which creator drove that sale?" is the question the whole platform exists to answer. Here is the actual path a sale takes, and the rules that decide who gets paid for it.

The click

Every partnership gets its own tracked link. When somebody follows it, we record a click event: the link it belongs to, when it happened, and enough context to tell a human visitor from a bot. Two things we deliberately do not record are the raw IP address — it is only ever stored as a salted hash — and anything that would identify the visitor personally.

The visitor also picks up a first-party visitor id. It is not a marketing profile and it follows nobody around the internet; it exists so that a purchase made twenty minutes later can be traced back to the click that started it.

The filter, applied once

Bot traffic and duplicate clicks are excluded from every number that matters. The important part is that the filtering happens in exactly one place — the nightly rollup — and every report reads the filtered result. A dashboard that re-derived "real" traffic with its own rules would produce a second set of numbers, and a second set of numbers is how the brand and the creator end up in a meeting disagreeing about reality.

The raw click counter on a tracked link is kept separately and labelled as raw. It is a diagnostic, not a payout input.

The sale

When an order is placed, attribution is resolved on the server from the recorded click events. It is resolved server-side on purpose: the browser is allowed to hint at which creator sent it, and that hint is never trusted for anything money-bearing. If a hint and the recorded evidence disagree, the evidence wins.

A typed promo code outranks a click. If a customer arrives through one creator's link and then types another creator's code at checkout, the code wins — it is the more deliberate signal, and both are counted as attributed traffic in reporting.

The split

Once the line is attributed, the split is computed once, from one place, and written to the ledger: the creator's commission, the platform fee taken from the creator, the business proceeds, and the platform fee taken from the business. Buyer-facing discounts are frozen onto the order line at the moment of sale, so a promotion that ends tomorrow cannot change what yesterday's order pays out.

Both sides then read the same rollup. A brand's campaign ROI and a creator's earnings for the same partnership are literally the same stored numbers, which is what makes them impossible to present differently to the two audiences.

What this means in practice

• A creator can see clicks arriving in near real time, and the sale that follows attached to them.
• A brand can see revenue per creator rather than reach per creator.
• Neither side has to take the other's word for any of it, because there is only one set of numbers to take.

That is the whole design goal. Everything else — the offer board, the approval workflow, the automatic payouts — is built on top of being able to answer that first question honestly.