LTK allows you to earn commission on sales after a shopper purchases items from your personal links from a wide range of brands. Read on for more FAQs on how commission is earned through the LTK platform. For how payment is issued on LTK, click here.

What happens after a shopper clicks one of your LTK links

When a shopper clicks on one of your LTK links on a blog, social channel, or visual widget link from a website tool (like a Shop The Post widget on a blog), a tracking cookie is embedded into the shopper’s internet browser. Once a tracking cookie is active, it allows you to earn commission off of your LTK links for an extended period of time. If a shopper places an order through your specific commissionable link, you will receive earnings from the total cart price of each reader's purchase after clicking on your LTK links for the full cookie window time, per the retailer terms. 

If a shopper returns any of the items purchased after clicking your commissionable link, you will see those items deducted as returns in your My Earnings tab.

Some brands do have exclusions on products they deem as commissionable and offer variable commission rates on select products and categories. For more information on exclusions, click here. 

Cookie window durations

The timeframe for each retailer's active cookie window can vary, depending on each brand’s policies. Most LTK brand partners’ cookie windows fall between 7 and 30 days, generally between 7 - 14 days on average.

How browsers affect cookie windows

You should note how browsers affect the cookie stored and how a cookie window can change pending browser type. For example:

• If you are using Google Chrome, close Google Chrome, and re-open a page in Google Chrome, the cookies will remain active for that retailer
• If someone clicks your LTK link in Safari, closes out of Safari, and then opens a browser window in Google Chrome, the cookie for your link will not be stored in the new Google Chrome browser window
• Cookies do not transfer from desktop to mobile browsers, and vice versa. If a Shopper clicks your commissionable link on a mobile device, then ultimately purchases the product on a desktop browser, you will not earn commission on the sale.

In addition, please note that Instagram does not have a cookie window, so your conversion rate and commission earned through direct product links shared on Instagram will always be much lower. Click here to learn how to increase your Instagram conversions, as shoppers need to make a purchase immediately after clicking your LTK link within an Instagram browser in order for you to earn commission on the sale. In order to receive commission on a purchase made through the Instagram browser, the shopper cannot exit out of the Instagram browser window.

App-to-app commission tracking

If a shopper has a brand’s shopping app downloaded on their mobile device, often the shopping app will open following a click on one of your LTK commissionable links. Instead of opening in a browser window where a tracking cookie will track their purchase, your followers may complete their purchase in the brand’s mobile app and this could cause orders to not track successfully. LTK offers app-to-app tracking for these brands’ shopping apps, allowing you to earn commission even if the shopper makes a purchase within the shopping app vs. the brand’s website.

Commission rates per brand

Each LTK brand partner selects their own commission rate upon partnering with LTK. Our Brand Partnerships team negotiates the highest commission possible for you, our Creators. You can use the Link bookmarklet tool, formerly called Link Ninja, to calculate the exact commission rate a brand is offering at that time. Sometimes, a brand will offer a varied commission rate depending on the category of product sold. For example, the commission rate a brand offers for a sofa or luxury good may be lower than commission rates on other product categories. If this is the case, the link bookmarklet tool will note the varied commission rate. 

When using the LTK Creator app’s product linking tool, you will see each brand labeled as having either a High, Medium, or Low commission rate. Commission rates for each range are listed below for your reference:

• High: Net commission rate is greater than or equal to 11%
• Medium: Net commission rate is between 7% - 11%
• Low: Net commission rate is less than or equal to 7%

Receiving credit for the sale

It’s possible that retailers will credit a source other than your commissionable link for a shopper’s purchase. It’s possible that your link will lose credit as the source of the sale if:

• The shopper clicks another commissionable link, either from another Creator or another affiliate before purchasing 
• The shopper uses a one-time promo code, like a discount code after signing up for the retailer’s newsletter, when checking out
• The shopper clicks another tracking link from Google Shopping or another search engine that embeds a tracking cookie in the shopper’s browser

Examples of popular retailers' tracking parameters

When a product link's URL has multiple tracking codes, your commission tracking can be affected. You will need to remove all tracking code from the end of a URL before generating your own LTK link or saving the product to a folder. View examples of what extra tracking code looks like below to identify the portion of the brand site's URL to be deleted. Usually, the tracking code follows the "?" question mark symbol, after the product identifying portion of the URL and the .com.

Should you have any additional questions, please reference our FAQ & Tech Support Page.