6 Reasons Why a User Might Not Get Credit for Earning
Advertiser Disclosure
Our readers always come first
The content on DollarSprout includes links to our advertising partners. When you read our content and click on one of our partners’ links, and then decide to complete an offer — whether it’s downloading an app, opening an account, or some other action — we may earn a commission from that advertiser, at no extra cost to you.
Our ultimate goal is to educate and inform, not lure you into signing up for certain offers. Compensation from our partners may impact what products we cover and where they appear on the site, but does not have any impact on the objectivity of our reviews or advice.
Though rare, a number of factors can interfere with a user receiving credit for a purchase. The following are some of the use cases that result in missed earnings.
It can take a few days for an earning to show up after purchase. If it has been a few days and a commission still hasn’t registered, here are a few reasons that might be the case:
1. User has a privacy/ad blocking extension or browser that deliberately strips tracking parameters from URLs and/or cookies, making the purchase unattributable.
2. User purchased an item from an excluded category for that Merchant. Categories and specific SKUs that are exempt from earning are described by merchants and can change over time.
3. Another affiliate received credit for the purchase. If in the course of shopping, the user clicked on a link that re-affiliated their session (most commonly, users read reviews that have affiliate links in them, or they go looking for coupon codes that also re-affiliate the sale), then that party would earn the affiliate revenue, instead of DollarSprout Rewards. Less commonly, but related to this, some merchants have a “first click” policy, rather than the more common “last click” policy for affiliation. So if a user clicked an affiliate link while shopping for something, then afterwards tried to re-affiliate using DollarSprout Rewards (e.g., clicking an “Activate Cashback” button in a browser extension), the original affiliate would still receive credit for the sale because they were the “first click.”
4. User thinks that they participated in a program (i.e. clicked a “Activate Cashback” button) but did not actually participate/click the button.
5. User completed a purchase after a referral period passed. For example, some merchants restrict earning to making a purchase within 24 hours of clicking through a referral link. If a user clicked Activate Cashback but didn’t purchase anything for 24 hours, then went back to the website on their own (i.e. entered the URL into the address bar) and made a purchase, then this doesn’t count as a referral and no commission is earned.
6. Merchant has an error in their tracking or reporting such that the merchant never reported to DollarSprout Rewards that a purchase was attributed to the user.