Q: How do I QA my affiliate tracking before going live?

Q: How do I QA my affiliate tracking before going live?

Broken tracking means you either pay for nothing or stiff real partners. Test it like this, in order:

— Generate a test link as a real affiliate would and click it. Confirm the cookie or click ID lands.
— Complete a full purchase yourself. Confirm the conversion fires and attributes to that test affiliate, not to direct.
— Test the edge cases: a refund should reverse, a click then a 2-day wait then a purchase should still attribute inside your window.
— Check cross-device and cookie-blocked browsers. Server-side postbacks should still fire where client-side cookies don't.
— Verify deduplication so one sale never pays two partners.

The caveat: don't test only the happy path. The failures that hurt are the weird ones, mobile-to-desktop, refunds, multiple touches. Spend most of your QA time there. And keep a permanent internal test account so you can re-verify tracking after any site change, because checkout updates silently break postbacks more often than anything else.

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