How do affiliate links work, and what do they change for you as a shopper?

What happens between a "Visit store" click and a commission: the redirect, the network cookie, what is shared about you, why the price does not change, and affiliate vs sponsored.

Almost every comparison site, review blog and 'best of' list is paid through affiliate links. That is not a secret, but the mechanics are rarely explained, so people either assume the worst (the site is selling their data) or nothing at all (the price must be marked up). Both are wrong in the common case. Here is the whole path, using NextToolHub's own setup as the example because we can describe it exactly.

Step 1: you click a store button

On NextToolHub every store button points to our own address first — /go/ followed by the product id and a 'placement' (which button you used). Our server records that a click happened for that product from that placement, at that time. With your consent to the 'affiliate / attribution' cookie category the browser also passes an anonymous tab-session id and any campaign code you arrived with; without that consent the click is recorded without them. No name, e-mail or account is ever attached.

Then the server answers with a redirect to the affiliate network's link for that product. You never see the network link because the browser follows the redirect immediately.

Step 2: the network sets its cookie and sends you to the store

The network (Admitad, in our case) receives the request with a 'sub id' — our anonymous click reference — sets a cookie on its own domain and on the store's domain that says 'this visitor came through NextToolHub', and redirects you to the product page. This cookie has a lifetime set by each programme: typically a few days to a month. If you buy within that window, the sale is attributed to the last affiliate whose cookie is present.

That is the 'last click' rule, and it explains a common surprise: if you click our link, then click a different site's link for the same product, the second site gets the commission. It also explains why a site cannot 'steal' a sale from a link you did not click.

Step 3: you pay the store's normal price

The commission comes out of the merchant's margin — it is a marketing cost they have already budgeted, the same way they pay for search ads. The product price is the same whether you arrive through an affiliate link, a search engine or by typing the address. There are a few exceptions in the other direction: some programmes provide affiliate-only coupon codes, in which case the affiliate path is cheaper.

Refunds and cancellations reverse the commission. The network waits for the store's return window to close before paying out, which is why affiliates are paid weeks or months after the click.

What is shared about you — and what is not

From NextToolHub to the network: an anonymous click id and the placement. Nothing about who you are. From the network to us: whether that click id led to an order, the order value and the commission — no name, no address, no items beyond what the programme reports. From the store to the network: order status for attribution. The store never tells us who bought.

What we do keep is a count: how many clicks each product and each button placement gets. That count is used for popularity in ranking and for abuse detection, and its anonymous session id is deleted after 90 days.

• Shared: anonymous click id, placement, order status and commission per click id.
• Not shared: your identity, address, payment details, or what else you bought.
• Not stored by us: any link between a click and a person.

Affiliate is not sponsored, and neither buys a ranking

An affiliate link is a normal listing whose outbound link carries a tracking code; the store did not pay to appear and did not choose its position. A sponsored placement is a slot a brand paid for, marked 'Sponsored', outside the organic results. NextToolHub currently has no sponsored placements; if we add any they will be labelled and separate.

Commission has zero weight in our ranking — the formula is public on the How we rank page and a test in our code fails if a commission term is ever added. Products from stores that pay us nothing are ranked by exactly the same rules. The honest incentive an affiliate site has is different: to send you to stores where you actually buy and do not return, because reversed orders pay nothing.

Method

This article describes the affiliate flow as it is implemented on NextToolHub in September 2026: our /go redirect, the Admitad network, and the programmes we are enrolled in (AliExpress, Alibaba.com, Wondershare). Where other sites differ we say so. The commission and cookie rules quoted are the network's public programme terms and can change; nothing here is legal advice.

Verdict

An affiliate link changes who the store pays a marketing fee to — not your price, and not what the store knows about you.

Last click wins: the site you clicked most recently before buying gets the commission.

Judge an affiliate site by whether its ranking is independent of commission and whether it labels sponsored slots — both are checkable, and both are published here.

Questions people ask

Can I avoid the affiliate link and still support the site?

If you type the store address yourself, no commission is paid. Using the link costs you nothing and is how the site is funded; the choice is yours, and the buttons always say what they are.

Do affiliate links make a product rank higher on NextToolHub?

No. Commission carries zero weight; ranking uses relevance, data quality, demand, recomputed discount and popularity. The formula and weights are published on the How we rank page.

What if I decline the affiliate cookie category?

Store links still work and the click is still counted for the product. Only the anonymous session id and campaign codes are left out, so the click cannot be attributed to a campaign. The network's own cookie on the store's domain is governed by the network and store, not by our banner.