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Commission attribution sounds like the most boring possible corner of the influencer economy, a back-end accounting question nobody outside finance departments thinks about. A new investigation says otherwise. Researcher Ben Edelman has accused ShopMy, one of fashion’s fastest-growing affiliate platforms, of quietly steering merchants to cancel commissions owed to competing networks and pay ShopMy instead, according to newly published research.
Edelman published his findings Aug. 20, centered on a now-deleted ShopMy support page. That page reportedly told brands running both a ShopMy program and a traditional affiliate program to cancel duplicate commissions inside the rival network, not inside ShopMy itself, whenever the same sale showed up in both places. ShopMy, now valued at $1.5 billion, has not commented on the allegations.
That directive marks a clean break from how the rest of the affiliate industry operates. The standard practice, called last-click attribution, awards commission to whichever affiliate link a customer clicked most recently before completing a purchase. ShopMy’s guidance skipped that justification entirely. Understanding why requires looking closely at exactly what ShopMy said instead, and what it conspicuously did not say.
ShopMy Never Claimed Last Click. It Claimed a ‘More Direct’ Relationship Instead.
Last-click attribution has functioned as the affiliate industry’s basic ground rule for years, across networks like Impact, Awin, and Rakuten Advertising. Whichever affiliate link a shopper interacted with immediately before checkout gets the commission for that sale. That’s the rule. It is not a perfect system, but it gives merchants and creators a consistent, predictable way to settle disputes when more than one link could plausibly claim credit for the same purchase.
According to Edelman’s research, ShopMy’s own support page justified its position differently. It never claimed its link delivered the final click. Instead, the page said ShopMy offered brands “a more direct brand-to-creator connection.” Edelman noted that ShopMy did not point to any clause in a merchant contract or brand-partner agreement that would actually entitle it to override a commission another network’s affiliate had already earned.
That gap between justification and documentation is exactly what Edelman’s research set out to quantify. He identified 527 ShopMy brand partners that also ran affiliate programs through at least one other established network. That number alone proves nothing. It does, however, show the potential scale of the practice if merchants actually followed ShopMy’s guidance exactly the way it was originally written.
173 Merchants on One Network Alone Could Be Affected
Edelman’s research breaks the 527 affected brand partners down by which rival network they also used. Among them, 173 merchants also ran programs through Impact, 163 through Awin, and 101 through Rakuten Advertising. Those three networks account for most of the overlap Edelman found. Any merchant on that list was theoretically exposed to the deduplication guidance ShopMy had published for months before it was quietly taken down.
That number requires an important caveat, one Edelman himself acknowledges directly. Appearing on the list does not prove a merchant actually paid two commissions, reversed another affiliate’s earned payment, or even followed ShopMy’s guidance at all. ShopMy’s current documentation states that merchants themselves control order validation and retain the ability to reverse commissions whenever duplicate or conflicting attribution shows up in their own systems.
Edelman has not stopped at documenting the practice. In follow-up commentary, he pushed back directly against reporting suggesting the tactic carries no legal risk, arguing it could amount to tortious interference with contract, encouraging merchants to break commitments already owed to another party. Whether any court ever tests that theory remains an open question. What is not in question is that ShopMy is far from the first platform accused of exactly this move.
ShopMy Is the Fourth Shopping Platform Accused of This Exact Move
ShopMy is the fourth shopping or affiliate platform to face this specific accusation in roughly two years. Similar claims have previously targeted Honey, Capital One Shopping, and Phia, the shopping extension backed by Phoebe Gates, whose own alleged commission overrides Edelman had already investigated weeks earlier. One platform doing this would be a notable story on its own. A fourth in two years starts to look like a pattern rather than an isolated lapse.
The financial stakes explain why this keeps happening. The affiliate marketing industry moves an estimated $210 billion annually, and platforms are increasingly competing for credit on the exact same underlying sales rather than driving genuinely new business to merchants. ShopMy itself has grown explosively during this period, with revenue reportedly up 200% over the past 12 months, a trajectory that makes every disputed commission worth fighting over that much more valuable in dollar terms.
None of this plays out as an abstract corporate dispute. Every disputed commission traces back to an actual creator who posted a link, actually drove a sale, and expected to get paid for it. If a merchant quietly reversed that payment in favor of a bigger platform’s claim, the creator who did the real work may never even find out their commission simply went somewhere else instead.