[harrisonjackson]

I don't know why the author didn't reach out to the actual affiliate tracking company. As an engineer, as soon as I got push back from the retailer that is the first thing I would have done. That or start polling my readers to see if anyone had purchased through them. You already disclose you are an affiliate so asking your loyal audience if they made purchase (which if they clicked through they are knowingly supporting you) should have gotten some response.

I worked at rewardstyle (a fashion affiliate technology company) for nearly three years when it first launched and built out their instagram affiliate tool LikeToKnow.it as a side project with one other developer and a designer. We faced A LOT of mistrust and doubt from affiliates about earnings - sometimes valid and sometimes not.

There are so so so many ways that different retailers would invalidate earnings, break the tracking, the buyer would delete their cookies, buyer would get redirected from a us store to au or eu or other intl and have it not track, we'd miscalculate a payout somehow, ship some bugs, etc.

But we knew that we were in an industry that was looked at as pretty scummy so we did our best to always make things right and error on the side of generosity.

There were times where a retailer would break the commission tracking on their checkout page and we would know there were 1000 sales but wouldn't be able to attribute them directly to a specific affiliate. We had to just do our best to extrapolate their earnings and add a "sorry something broke" bonus.