Recommend holdmark

If you talk to online stores — because you write, because you teach, because you run them — holdmark pays you a share of what it charges each store that arrives through you. This page says how much, how we know it was you, and what you can't do.

What we pay

Two levels. The difference is the work, not how much we like you.

The percentage is calculated on what holdmark actually receives for that store — not on the list price. They are not the same thing: Shopify charges the merchant and pays us afterwards, once it has deducted its processing fee, its revenue share and, in some countries, an extra regulatory fee. What gets shared is what arrives, and what arrives is whatever Shopify's payout says.

A store on the smallest tier leaves around $13 a month to an affiliate and around $20 to a partner. One on the largest tier, around $97 and around $145. The tiers are published and there are no negotiated prices behind the scenes.

Twelve billed months, not twelve calendar months

The commission lasts twelve months of the store actually paying. The clock does not run during the fourteen-day trial, nor during a month that was never charged, nor if the store cancels and comes back later.

It is written that way for one concrete reason: holdmark sometimes gives a store free months. If the year were a calendar year, we would be taking that gift out of your pocket. With billed months nothing is taken from you: it is postponed.

How we know a store came from you

The merchant says so. There is a field in their app panel: “Did someone refer you?”. They type your code and from then on that store is yours. They have sixty days from installing to do it.

There is no tracking cookie, and it's worth knowing why, because it affects you.

• It would almost never work. When a store installs from the App Store, the app opens inside the Shopify admin, in a frame. There the browser won't let us read our own cookie, and Shopify's rules also require the app to work without that kind of cookie.
• And it would cost us. An attribution cookie isn't needed to provide the service, so in Europe it requires consent: a cookie banner on a site that has none today, in order to follow people who aren't our customers for two months. holdmark's whole pitch is that there are no tricks here.

So the code travels with you, not with the browser: you say it in your video, you write it in your email, you put it in your post. Fewer stores get attributed than with a cookie. That's true and we'd rather say it. In exchange, what does get attributed to you is beyond dispute.

And the merchant sees it

Your name appears in their panel: “Jane Doe referred your store”, with the date and with a button to remove it. Always, not just on the first day.

This is deliberate and it is the part that matters most to us. holdmark exists to publish facts anyone can check; a referral programme whose attributions nobody could see would be exactly what we criticise. And it closes the most common fraud in these programmes — claiming stores you didn't bring — because whoever would suffer it sees it the same day.

It also means a store can take the credit away from you. It happens rarely, and when it does it's usually because they didn't remember you. That is the price of everything else being beyond question.

What you see

How many people clicked your link, how many stores are credited to you and how much has built up for you. You don't see which stores they are, or how much each one brings in, and that isn't coyness either: our price tiers go by order volume, so telling you what a store brings in would be telling you how much that merchant sells. That's theirs.

What the commission never touches

holdmark's pitch is that no store can pay to come out looking better. And at the same time it pays people to recommend it. Those two only coexist if the separation is structural, so it is:

• The commission does not depend on whether a store gets verified, on what figures it ends up with, or on what its record says. What is paid for is the recommendation, never the verdict.
• An affiliate cannot influence any piece of data of any store, nor the calculation, nor the order in which anything appears.
• An affiliate cannot give away access, months or discounts. There are no coupons and no discount codes. Your code identifies you; it does not make anything cheaper.
• An affiliate does not see data from the stores they brought. Not their figures, not their panel, not their private record.

The rules

They are few and they are firm. Breaking any of them closes access to the programme and leaves what is pending unpaid. They are here in plain language, and in full, with payment and deadlines, in the partner programme terms.

• Nothing in exchange for reviews. Don't offer, don't hint, don't ask a merchant to leave a rating for the app. Shopify forbids it explicitly, and forbids it outside the app too: one email or one message of yours can get holdmark's whole account cancelled. It is the rule we watch most closely.
• Say what holdmark does, not what you'd like it to do. Don't promise search rankings, or that AI assistants will cite a store, or more sales. We don't promise those either.
• Don't present yourself as holdmark. Not in your name, not in your profile, not in a domain. You recommend holdmark; you are not holdmark.
• No ads using our brand and no bidding on “holdmark” in search engines: the click you'd be buying was already on its way here.
• No spam. No bought cold-email lists, no mass messages, no automated comments.
• Don't claim your own stores or those of companies you control.

What we don't do

• We don't pay per install, only for stores that pay. Paying per install invites bringing in stores that leave within a month.
• There is no second tier. You don't earn anything for recruiting other affiliates. That's the short road to looking like something else.
• There are no territorial exclusives and no quotas to hit.
• There is no minimum number of stores to get paid. If you bring one and it pays, you get paid for that one.

How to join

Tell us who you talk to and where. We read them ourselves, one by one: there is no automatic sign-up, because we get to know whoever recommends holdmark before giving them a code. We reply to the address you leave us, whether the answer is yes or no.

Apply to join the programme

If you join, you get your code, your link and the materials. We provide the materials, and that isn't decoration: it's how nobody ends up promising things in our name that we haven't measured.

If you are an agency or a consultancy and want to work as a partner, tick that box in the form.

And if you are already a partner, your dashboard is at holdmark.org/socios/entrar.

Sending the application means accepting the programme terms, and it is worth reading them first: they say when the commission accrues, when it is paid and what leaves a partner unpaid. They are here: partner programme terms.