Most affiliate programs forget you after 90 days
The smell of rain on hot tarmac through an open office window, a half-finished coffee going cold, and three browser tabs open—one for your email platform, one for your affiliate dashboard, one for a spreadsheet that’s meant to reconcile the two but never quite does.
Your affiliate link worked—the sale just happened four months too late
Most affiliate programs credit clicks for 30 to 90 days, then the attribution window closes and you earn nothing.
A reader clicks your affiliate link in March. They bookmark the product, read reviews, check their budget, wait for a sale. They buy in July. You get no commission. The attribution window expired in May, and the merchant’s tracking cookie disappeared with it.
This isn’t edge-case behaviour—it’s how considered purchases work. Software subscriptions, hosting plans, and course enrolments often follow 60- to 120-day decision cycles, but most affiliate programs cap attribution at 30 or 60 days. Amazon’s window is 24 hours. If the customer adds to cart but completes checkout the next day, you’re out.
The mechanic is simple: when someone clicks your affiliate link, the merchant sets a first-party cookie with an expiry timestamp. If the purchase happens before that timestamp, you get credited. If it happens after, the sale is attributed to “direct” or another referrer—even if your content did all the work. Some programs extend the window if the customer returns through your link again; most don’t. A few platforms let you append UTM parameters to track post-window conversions in your own analytics, but that data won’t trigger a payout.
The fix isn’t to spam links or artificially shorten the buyer journey—it’s to track your own referral cohorts outside the affiliate platform, measure the delta between click date and purchase date, and choose programs whose attribution windows match your audience’s decision speed. If you’re recommending $3,000 hosting plans, a 30-day window leaves money on the table. If you’re linking to $12 tools, 24 hours might be fine.
TACTIC
Stripe invoices arrive faster than payment links—here’s when that matters
When you need a customer to pay today, the tool you pick changes how fast money moves. Stripe payment links let buyers delay checkout; invoices land in their inbox with a due date and a sense of obligation. The lifecycle differs, too—invoices trigger dunning emails automatically, payment links don’t. If you’re selling sponsorships, courses, or consulting packages where the buyer expects a formal bill, the invoice path closes deals days sooner and handles disputes more cleanly.
READER QUESTION
WordPress staging pushes code but orphans uploads—what transfers and what doesn’t
You build a new landing page on staging, push it live, and the images are missing. Staging-to-production sync moves database tables and theme files, but most hosts skip the uploads folder, user-generated content, and form entries. Some sync tools let you cherry-pick tables; others push everything or nothing. If you’re running WooCommerce, membership plugins, or lead-capture forms, you need to know what gets left behind before you hit Deploy—and how to move it manually without breaking file paths or creating duplicates.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
Privacy tools strip referrer headers—your analytics blame direct traffic instead
A subscriber clicks your Twitter link, arrives at your site, and your analytics log it as “direct / none”. Browsers, VPNs, and privacy extensions now block or truncate referrer headers by default, so the HTTP request that tells Google Analytics or Plausible where the visitor came from never arrives. The traffic is real; the attribution is fiction. You can’t force browsers to send referrers, but you can append UTM parameters to every link you control—social posts, email footers, guest bylines—so your analytics platform has something to label when the referrer field is blank.
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