Affilitrak for Apps: Affiliate Tracking Built for Shopify App Developers

For years, affiliate tracking on the Shopify App Store has been a quiet headache.

Merchants got great affiliate tooling.

App developers got whatever they could stitch together, and the ones who built serious affiliate programs largely built them on Mantle.

But now, Mantle just announced that they are shutting down, and that creates a real problem.

Thousands of working affiliate links, partner relationships, and commission histories are suddenly at risk.

For a developer who spent years building a referral channel, losing it overnight is not a minor inconvenience.

It's a growth engine going dark.

So we built Affilitrak for Apps ( an affiliate tracking designed specifically for Shopify app developers).

And it doesn’t just pick up where Mantle left off.

Like all our other products, we’re always collecting feedback from our users and constantly improving and adding features.

And it's all engineered around a single goal: giving you a better affiliate marketing system to grow and scale your app.

Why affiliate tracking has been hard for app developers

Affiliate tracking for a storefront is relatively straightforward.

A shopper clicks a link, a cookie remembers who sent them, they check out, and the sale is credited.

The whole event happens in one place, your store, where your software can watch it.

App developers don't have that luxury.

The thing being "sold" is an app install that happens on the Shopify App Store, a property you don't control and can't instrument.

The Shopify Partner API will tell you that a shop installed your app and how much recurring revenue it generates, but it will not tell you who referred that install.

That single missing fact is the entire problem and without it, you either guess, or you don't pay your affiliates accurately.

Most tools guess.

They use time-window heuristics that assume any install close to a click was driven by that click, which quietly hands out commissions for installs that were entirely organic.

Mantle solved the harder version of this properly, and its shutdown is exactly why a real replacement matters.

Affilitrak for Apps was built to solve it the right way.

What happens to your previous affiliate system?

This is the part most migrations get wrong, so it's the part we got right first.

Affilitrak for Apps keeps the exact link format Mantle used:

> https://apps.shopify.com/<your-app>?mref=<affiliate-code>

Look closely at where that link points.

It goes to your Shopify App Store listing, not to any third-party dashboard or redirect service.

That is the whole trick, and it's what makes the transition invisible.

Because the destination is the App Store, every link your partners have already placed keeps resolving after Mantle goes dark.

The links in their old:

• Blog posts
• Email newsletters
• Agency referral pages
• YouTube descriptions.

All of it keeps working.

We honor the same “mref" parameter that Mantle used, so there is nothing for your affiliates to update, nothing to re-share, and nothing to break.

Compare that to a typical migration, where you'd be asking every affiliate to swap out every link they've ever published.

Some would do it slowly.

Many would never do it at all, and you'd watch a chunk of your referral traffic simply evaporate.

But Affilitrak for Apps avoids that entirely.

We’ll help you migrate in such a seamless manner that your affiliates won’t have to do a thing.

The seamless onboarding process

Migration from Mantle to Affilitrak for apps is a simple file upload.

• You export your affiliates from Mantle
• Drop the CSV into Affilitrak
• And we recreate the full structure of your program

So your affiliates, their referral links, and their original referral codes are mapped one to one so that attribution stays intact.

This ensures that the code/link that drove a sale yesterday is the same code that drives a sale tomorrow.

Past payouts come across as history, so nobody loses their record of what they've already earned.

Your affiliates won’t have to panic or quit your program due to new onboarding complexities because an affiliate logging in for the first time sees continuity, not a blank slate.

Two(2) details make this safe rather than nerve-racking.

First: you can preview the migration before anything is committed, so you see exactly what will be created before it's written.

Second: the import is designed to be repeatable without creating duplicates, so a second pass cleans up rather than doubling your data.

Migrating the channel that drives your growth should not feel like a leap of faith, and that’s why we built the easiest onboarding flow with Affilitrak for Apps.

The seamless affiliate onboarding system

As I mentioned earlier on, bringing affiliates onto a new platform is usually where programs lose people.

The standard approach most people go for is to send a mass email asking everyone to go sign up and rebuild their account from scratch.

Affilitrak for apps does it differently.

When you're ready, we send magic-link invitations to pre-created accounts.

There is no "register here and re-enter everything" friction, because the account already exists with their data in it.

And because trust matters most during a platform change, each invitation shows the affiliate their own imported details, their name and their referral count, carried over from Mantle.

The email reads as a continuation of a relationship they already have, which is exactly what it is.

That small touch is the difference between an affiliate shrugging and ignoring the email, and an affiliate clicking through because it's obviously really their program.

The Affilitrak for apps attribution system

Attribution is the heart of the product, so it's worth explaining how it actually works.

As covered above, the Shopify Partner API knows which shops installed your app and what they pay, but not who referred them.

To credit affiliates honestly, you have to connect that install back to the click that caused it.

Affilitrak for apps does this by joining two trustworthy sources:

1. The Shopify Partner API provides the deterministic facts; which shops installed your app, and the recurring subscription revenue each one generates over time.

2. Your GA4 and BigQuery export provides the missing link; it captures the mref on the listing page view and connects it to the install that followed.

Joined together, these two sources produce a precise, strong-signal match.

A referred install gets attributed cleanly to the affiliate who earned it.

An organic install stays organic.

We deliberately do not fall back to time-window guessing to inflate the numbers, because a commission paid on a phantom referral is money out of your pocket and trust out of your program.

The numbers Affilitrak for Apps shows you are numbers you can defend to your partners, line by line.

Connecting all of this is far simpler than it sounds.

You grant our read-only service account viewer access to your analytics export, and you're done.

There is no per-developer key to generate, store, or rotate, and the access is read-only by design, so Affilitrak for apps can see what it needs to attribute installs and nothing more.

Commissions

App developers don't earn on a one-time order.

They earn on recurring subscriptions, month after month.

A commission model built around single transactions fundamentally misunderstands the business, so Affilitrak for Apps's model is built around recurrence from the ground up.

For each app, you set two things:

1. An optional install bounty, a flat amount paid once per referred install

2. A recurring revenue share, a percentage of the referred shop's subscription payments, paid either for the lifetime of the relationship or for a fixed number of months.

From there, accrual is automatic.

Every billing cycle that a referred shop pays, the matching commission posts to your affiliate's balance on its own.

You don't calculate anything by hand, and you don't reconcile spreadsheets at the end of the month.

A simple example makes it concrete.

Suppose you set a 20 percent recurring revenue share with no install bounty, and an affiliate refers to a shop that subscribes to your 50 dollar per month plan.

The first month, 10 dollars accrues to that affiliate.

The next month, another 10 dollars, and so on, for as long as your rules say the share lasts.

If you'd added a 5 dollar install bounty, that 5 dollars would post once when the install is attributed, with the recurring share continuing on top.

The accrual is also governed by rules you control, so it stays accurate and fair:

• Each billing cycle is counted once, so a referred shop's payment never accidentally pays an affiliate twice.

• A minimum plan value can be set, so only meaningful subscriptions trigger a commission.

• A duration can be capped at a set number of months or left as lifetime.

• Trials accrue nothing, because there is no charge to share until a trial converts to a paid subscription.

• Commissions begin from the point an affiliate is credited going forward, so you're never back-paying cycles that were already settled elsewhere during your migration.

Payouts then run on the same reliable rails that Affilitrak merchants already trust, so the money side is mature, not experimental.

The affiliate portal

Just like “Affilitrak for merchants”, your affiliates get a clean, standalone dashboard of their own.

They can see the:

• Shops they've referred
• Watch their performance over time
• Track upcoming earnings and payout history in one place.

It's the kind of transparency that keeps good affiliates engaged, because they can always see exactly where they stand.

It's also built for how affiliates actually work.

Plenty of partners promote both storefront brands and apps, and on Affilitrak that affiliate lives in a single account.

This means they can switch between the storefront programs and the app programs they belong to without juggling separate logins or learning two different tools.

That’s one identity and one dashboard for every program they're a part of.

How Affilitrak-for-Apps was built

A note for the engineering-minded, because it matters for reliability.

Affilitrak for Apps is not a separate, bolted-on product racing to catch up to the rest of the platform.

It is the same Affilitrak platform that already powers merchant affiliate programs, extended to treat app developers as first-class users.

The affiliate management, the ledger, the payouts, and the portal that an app developer relies on are the same mature systems that merchants already run their programs on, not a version-one rewrite built in parallel.

In practice, that means less surface area, fewer surprises, and more reliability.

The parts of an affiliate program that absolutely cannot afford to be flaky, the money math and the payout history, are the parts that have already been hardened in production.

You're adopting something proven, not something promising.

How to get started

If you're on Mantle, the only reason to wait is the clock, and your links surviving the shutdown is reason enough not to.

Step 1
Create your developer account and add your app by pasting your App Store listing URL. You can manage a single app or many under one account.

Step 2
Upload your Mantle export to bring your affiliates, links, and codes across, with a preview before anything is committed.

Step 3
Set your commission rules and send magic-link invites to your affiliates.

Step 4
Connect tracking with the Partner API and your GA4 or BigQuery export whenever you're ready to turn on live attribution.

Here's the part worth underlining: steps one through three get your program running immediately, with no tracking setup required.

Your links work and your data is safe from the moment you migrate.

Step four(4) turns on automated, precise attribution, and you can do it on your own schedule rather than racing the clock to get everything wired up at once.

Frequently asked questions

Do my affiliates have to do anything during the migration?

No.

Because their existing links point at your App Store listing and we honor the same mref codes, every link they've already shared keeps working. You migrate the program. They keep promoting as normal.

What happens to the payouts my affiliates have already earned?

They come across as history during the import, so each affiliate keeps a complete record of what they've been paid. Nobody starts from zero.

Can I see what will happen before I commit the migration?

Yes.

You can preview the import first, so you can confirm exactly what will be created before anything is written, and the process is built to run again safely without creating duplicates.

How are installs attributed to the right affiliate?

By joining the Shopify Partner API, which knows which shops installed and what they pay, with your GA4 and BigQuery export, which connects the affiliate's referral code to the resulting install. Installs that can be matched with a strong signal are attributed; installs that can't are left organic rather than guessed.

Do I have to connect tracking right away?

No.

You can launch your program, migrate your affiliates, and keep your links alive without connecting tracking first. Live attribution is a step you turn on when you're ready.

How do commissions get paid out?

Recurring commissions accrue automatically each billing cycle a referred shop pays, then pay out through the same payout system Affilitrak merchants already use.

Can one affiliate promote both my app and storefront brands?

Yes.

An affiliate who works across apps and storefronts uses a single account and switches between programs without separate logins.

Conclusion

Your affiliates built your growth.

So when a platform like Mantle disappears, that growth shouldn't disappear with it.

Affilitrak for Apps was built so it doesn't.

Your links survive, your history carries over, your affiliates stay in place, and your attribution is honest enough to defend to every partner you have.

Start your migration today.