What counts as attributed revenue
The exact test an order has to pass before any of it reaches your bill, written out in full so you can check our numbers against your own Shopify admin.
The short version
We charge you on the sales this app produced. Not your total store orders, and not your total store revenue. In a month where the app sold nothing, there is nothing to charge for.
That sentence is easy to write and most apps in this category write some version of it. What almost none of them do is say what it means. "Revenue driven by the app" is a phrase, not a rule, and a phrase cannot be checked. So here is ours, condition by condition. It is the same rule the billing code runs, and none of it is a statistical estimate.
The test
An order counts towards your attributed revenue only when every one of these is true.
The offer was shown. We recorded the offer rendering on a real storefront view. An offer you configured but that never appeared in front of anyone cannot earn us anything.
The shopper accepted it. They took the action the offer asked for. A shopper who saw the offer and scrolled past it costs you nothing.
The offered item is in the order that was paid for. If a shopper accepts an add on and then removes it before checkout, it does not count, whatever our dashboard would prefer.
The chain of events links that acceptance to that order. We keep the record that connects the display, the acceptance and the order that followed. Where the chain is broken, the order does not count. Under-counting costs us money and guessing costs you money, so we under-count.
It is a real online sale. Point of sale orders do not count. Neither do imported orders, historical orders, test orders, or orders that were cancelled.
It came after the offer went live. Two separate cut offs, and both apply. Nothing from before you installed the app can ever be billed, so your trading history is not part of your first invoice. And an order placed before a particular offer was published does not count towards that offer, because the offer was not there to cause it.
Refunds have been deducted in proportion. A refund is taken off the attributed amount in the same proportion as the money you gave back. Refund half an item and half of it comes off, not all of it and not none of it. This is arithmetic, not a goodwill gesture.
The settlement window has passed. We wait until the money is safe, measured from when the order actually shipped, so that cancellations and returns land before your invoice rather than after it.
In numbers: revenue becomes billable 30 days after the order is fulfilled. If an order is never fulfilled at all, which is normal for downloads and some services, it becomes billable 44 days after the order was placed. That is the same 30 days, plus 14 days of waiting for a fulfilment that is not coming, so a shop selling files is billable eventually rather than never.
If your market needs longer, the 30 can be raised on your shop and both dates move with it. Cash on delivery is the reason that setting exists: return rates in some markets run between 20 and 40 percent, and billing before settlement would mean a stream of reversals and a ledger nobody can read.
The date we show you is the date that happens. If we learn about a fulfilment later than expected, the date is recalculated and the new one is what you see, rather than the dashboard saying one thing and the invoice doing another.
What this rules out, stated plainly
Things you will never be charged for, because they fail the test above:
- Orders from your point of sale.
- Orders imported from another platform or a previous app.
- Anything that happened before you installed the app.
- Orders where an offer was displayed but the shopper bought something else.
- Test orders.
- Cancelled orders, and the refunded share of any order.
- Subscription renewals. Our widget created the first order, so we are paid for that one. Month eight renews with no involvement from us, and charging for it would be the thing we built this product to argue against.
How you check us
You do not have to take the dashboard's word for it. Every order this app touched is tagged in your own Shopify admin, with the offer that did it. Filter on the tag and you have our working, in the system you already trust, alongside the numbers Shopify calculated itself.
Every line on your bill also names the orders behind it and explains in a sentence why each one counted. How billing works covers that side of it.
If you think a charge is wrong
Tell us which order and we will show you the event chain for it, or take the charge off. An attribution system that cannot be argued with is not published, it is just announced.