Please note that, per our affiliate program terms and conditions, we are unable to credit affiliate accounts for improperly tracked sales. If a sale is not appearing in your dashboard, it was not properly tracked.
Please do not contact support with questions about requesting credit for missed conversions.
Before submitting a ticket or help request, we ask that you carefully review this and our other affiliate resources.
Why wasn't I credited for a purchase?
There are a variety of reasons referrals may not be tracked properly:
- The purchaser did not use your referral link.
- Your URL should end in ?rfsn= followed by a random string
- If you don't have this URL or believe you have an incorrect one, verify you are using the right one by logging into your affiliate dashboard here. Your full affiliate link should be displayed in the yellow box on the main dashboard.
- The ?rfsn= portion of the URL only needs to be used or shown in the URL on the first page you send visitors to; it will disappear if users navigate around the site by design
- The purchaser used your link, but then tried searching for a coupon or discount code, located one and ultimately used it. This would override your referral in most cases even if no discount code is ultimately used. We strongly encourage you to remind referrals to not search for discount codes during the checkout process.
- The purchaser used an incomplete or incorrect version of your referral link.
- The purchaser followed another affiliate's referral link after using yours.
- The purchaser followed your link but then entered the Out of the Sandbox site through another marketing channel, which may take precedence over your referral.
- The purchaser has disabled or cleared browser cookies.
- The purchaser switched to a different device after the first click and before completing the purchase.
- The purchaser waited more than 30 days to make a purchase since originally clicking the link.
- The purchaser's browser configuration, namely ad blockers or other features or settings that block tracking, may be preventing proper tracking.
- The purchaser was sent directly to the checkout process using a cart permalink.
- Our affiliate system's fraud tracking system activated and marked the conversions as invalid.
- There may be a delay in reporting or tracking that is preventing your valid sale from appearing.
We encourage all affiliates to review tracked commissions on a regular basis so you are aware of any issues before referring additional sales.
How long does it take for my referral to show?
In most cases, referrals appear within a 30 minutes, but some factors can cause it to take 24-72 additional hours to appear.
If you are not seeing a sale after 72 hours, please see the section above about possible reasons it may not have been tracked properly. Unfortunately, Out of the Sandbox support is unable to investigate why conversions are not tracked properly and any email requests for this will not receive a response.
Please note that conversions may be listed as "pending" for 30-60 days until they are verified by our accounting team.
What steps can I take to make sure my referral is tracked?
- Remind users that they should not search for any discount codes during the purchase process. Your customer can still use coupons advertised by Out of the Sandbox (see "Can customers use discounts?" section below).
- Be sure your customer or client is using a browser that does not block any tracking features (including the setting that sends a "do not track" request to servers). In some cases, ad blocking software can also affect our ability to track sales.
- Specifically, any users blocking cookies or tracking from the domains outofthesandbox.refersion.com and refersion.com will not track properly.
- In some cases, using the "private browsing" or "incognito" feature of your browser with ad and tracking blocking features disabled can help.
- Avoid excessive testing of your referral link. A prominent spike in clicks can cause our system's fraud detection systems to activate.
- Double check that you provided the correct and full referral link to your referrals. Sometimes a character or two may get cut off or changed, which will result in improperly tracked sales.
- If you are sending the referral link via email, some email programs may add spaces, periods or other characters to your URL, which can cause a malformed link that cannot be tracked. To avoid this, we suggest copying your referral URL on to its own line in an email without any periods, spaces or other punctuation after it.
- Do not send customers directly to a pre-filled cart using "cart permalinks." Due to some technical limitations, these sales cannot be properly tracked.
- In some cases, purchasers may close or navigate away from our order confirmation page without allowing it to completely load and, hence, the sale is not properly tracked.
- If a customer requests and is issues a refund for any theme purchase, the commission will be voided.
- Finally, you may want to consider making the purchase on behalf of your customer. Please note that you must enter your customer's name, email address, billing address and other contact information (not yours) for the theme to be properly licensed. However, you will need to verify that your own browser is free from any settings that may interfere with tracking.
Can you give me credit for a purchase that was not tracked?
As outlined in our affiliate program terms and conditions, we cannot retroactively credit affiliates for purchases that are not properly tracked, even in cases where the referral instructions were followed.
Out of the Sandbox does no longer offers any courtesy credits for any missed conversions for any reason.
Why can't you provide credits for referrals not tracked properly?
While we understand it is frustrating that conversions are sometimes not tracked, please keep in mind that, we cannot provide credits for purchases that are not tracked properly, namely because, in order to be fair to all affiliates and ensure the viability of the program, we rely on our referral tracking system as "proof of referral" to link you and the purchaser directly.
Unfortunately, the fact that a purchase was timestamped after your referral click is not sufficient and we cannot issue credits simply based on this evidence.
We also cannot accept screenshots of conversations where you suggest the theme to a client because there are ultimately other ways the client may have purchased the theme.
When considering missed commissions that affect your account balance, we encourage you to keep these points in mind:
- In most cases, commission payments on a single theme are less than than $30 or $50, depending on any special offers.
- When requesting us to process retroactive credits for missed commissions, consider the value of both your time and ours compared to the potential commission.
- Your time as a business owner is valuable and processing one time courtesy retroactive credits also uses valuable resources at Out of the Sandbox that detract from the time and resources we have to provide technical support, develop themes and more.
- Repeated emails back and forth that simply reaffirm our policies also consume a considerable amount of both your time and ours.
Can customers use discounts?
Purchasers can use any discount codes that they are eligible for, subject to our terms and conditions. However, please note that final commission calculations are based on the order total after any discounts have been taken, so the use of discount codes will affect your commission amount slightly.
We generally recommend that you provide customers with codes directly that are part of our general seasonal sales or promotions.
Please note, however, that customers who follow your affiliate link, search for discount code using a search engine and end up making a purchase after that search may not be properly tracked.
This can happen even if the customers does not use any of the discount code shown on results, the code shown on those pages are invalid or if they ultimately use one of our general promotional codes.
The best way to avoid this is to not search for discount codes and to advise your customers to avoid this as well.
Why is my referral showing as 'ineligible'?
Our system uses a variety of factors to determine if a referral is ineligible for commission payment. Unfortunately, if a referral is determined to be ineligible, we are unable to reverse this or pay commission on these sales.
To avoid having sales marked as ineligible, please be sure you are only using the link to send legitimate referrals to our site.
I didn't get my commission
While we are sorry that your commission was not tracked, we are unable to offer retroactive credits except as a one time courtesy as outlined above. We encourage you to continue sending traffic to our site and we will, as long as you remain eligible for the program, track clicks and purchases whenever possible.
I keep having issues getting credited for sales. What alternatives are there to the affiliate program?
If you have repeated issues with conversions being improperly tracked and you are creating Shopify stores for clients, our affiliate program may not be ideal for your business.
Another good alternative is to increase your professional fees by approximately the amount a theme commission would be — typically between $30 and $70, depending on the theme — and pass that cost along to the customer.
In this situation, you can continue to use your affiliate link in tandem with the price change so when conversions do track, you'll get the extra money you charged the client plus your affiliate commission (subject to approval). If tracking does not work due to browser issues, you've at least earned a bit extra.
Note that we cannot credit missed conversions if you are using this strategy.