How attribution works on Feedshop.
From a tap on a marker to a paid commission: what we record, what we deliberately don't, and why the whole pipeline is privacy-first.
Feedshop's entire economics rest on one thing: when someone buys because a creator showed them the product, that sale must be traced back to the creator. Here is exactly how that works — and what we chose not to build.
A tap becomes a click record
When you tap a product marker, the link doesn't go straight to the store. It passes through our click service, which records a single click: which marker and post it belongs to, the time, the referring page, and your browser's user-agent string. Instead of your IP address we store a salted one-way hash of it — the raw address is never written anywhere. Then you're redirected to the store, in one hop, with a click reference attached to the outgoing link.
That click reference identifies the click, not you. It carries no cookie, no fingerprint, and no cross-site identifier — we could not follow you around the web with it even if we wanted to.
A purchase becomes a commission
When a purchase completes, the store's affiliate program reports the sale together with the click reference we attached. Our systems match it back to the recorded click — and through it, to the marker, the post, and the creator. The commission shows up in the creator's studio, attributed to the exact post that earned it.
This works across two kinds of tracking. Most stores are reached through established affiliate networks. Stores that work with us directly use Feedshop Direct, our first-party integration, where the store's own systems report orders and refunds straight to us. Either way the attribution model is the same: one click record, one reference, one traceable chain from photo to payout.
Privacy-first, on purpose
We built the pipeline this way because attribution doesn't require surveillance. Counting a click needs a click — not a profile. Hashed IPs let us detect click fraud without keeping addresses; cookieless, self-hosted analytics tell us how the feed is used without telling anyone else; and the click reference ties a sale to a post, not to a person. It's a simpler system to trust, and honestly, a simpler system to build.