Tracking links and the Go to shop button
Every route from your site to a merchant goes through a tracking link. It carries two things: your affiliate ID, so you earn the commission, and the member's tag, so they get the cashback.
The Go to shop button
It appears on every shop page bound to a network. Pressing it sends the visitor to the merchant through the network's link.
For a signed-in member, the link carries their tag — cbtrkr-412 — and any sale is credited to them.
For a signed-out visitor, there is nobody to credit. Rather than sending them anyway and losing the cashback silently, they are sent to register first. Set where with Registration URL in Settings → General; leave it empty to use the WordPress registration page.
Styling the button
"Go to shop" button class in Settings → General adds your own CSS class to the button.
The usual reason is a login popup: if your theme opens one when a link has a particular class, put that class here and signed-out visitors get the popup instead of a page change.
Putting a link anywhere
The [tracking-link] shortcode builds one for any shop, so you can put a tracked link in a post, a review, a comparison table or a menu.
See [tracking-link].
Crediting the author instead of the visitor
Credit the post author in Settings → General puts the author's ID in tracking links rather than the visitor's.
This is for a specific arrangement: contributors who write shop content and are paid on what their pages earn. Every sale from a page then credits whoever wrote it, no matter who clicked.
Switch this on and no member ever earns cashback again — every link credits an author instead. It is not a tweak; it changes what your site is. Leave it off unless you are running exactly that arrangement.
Running several sites on one network account
If you use the same publisher ID on more than one WordPress install — separate domains, subdomains, or a site in a subdirectory — every one of them sends the same style of tag. Member 412 on your fashion site and member 412 on your travel site both become cbtrkr-412, and the sale is credited to whichever site's member happens to hold that ID.
Give each site its own prefix so the tags cannot collide. In your theme's functions.php:
That site now sends travel-412 instead of cbtrkr-412, and only it will claim those sales.
Use lowercase letters only, and set it before the site takes any real orders — orders already reported carry the old prefix and will no longer match.
Why a click is not recorded
Nothing is stored on your site when someone presses the button. The plugin does not know a click happened.
That is not an omission — the affiliate network is the one keeping score, and it only tells you anything once a sale exists. It is why there is no clicks report, and why a member who says "I clicked yesterday" cannot be checked against anything until the network reports.
See How affiliate networks fit in.
When a link does not credit the member
Working through it in order:
Was the member signed in? By far the most common cause. A signed-out visitor produces no tag at all.
Did they use your link? Opening the merchant in another tab, from a bookmark, or via a search after leaving your site all break the trail. The network credits whoever it saw last.
Did they have an ad blocker or strict privacy settings? Some block affiliate redirects entirely. Nothing on your side can fix that.
Is the shop's link correct? A shop whose deep link is wrong sends visitors to the merchant perfectly well and credits nothing — it looks fine right up until no orders ever arrive. Check the shop in the Shop catalog.
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