ShopMy Accused of Steering Merchants to Cancel Rival Affiliate Commissions

Quick Facts

ShopMy, valued at $1.5 billion, allegedly instructs merchant partners to cancel commissions earned through rival affiliate networks and reassign them to ShopMy creators.
Harvard Business School expert Ben Edelman estimates the practice could represent an eight-figure annual commission problem, with 173 Impact merchants, 163 Awin merchants, and 101 Rakuten merchants potentially affected.
The controversy follows the PayPal Honey scandal, in which a federal court denied PayPal’s motion to dismiss in June 2026 after creators alleged Honey hijacked their affiliate commissions.

A new investigation by Business of Fashion is targeting ShopMy, the fast-growing influencer affiliate platform, alleging it has guided merchant partners to cancel commissions earned by affiliates on competing networks and redirect those payments to ShopMy creators instead.

ShopMy, founded in 2020 by Christopher Tinsley and Harry Rein, has grown to more than 185,000 creators and 1,200 brand partners, generating over $1 billion in annual gross merchandise value. The company raised a $70 million Series C round in August 2025 and reached a $1.5 billion valuation by October of that year. Revenue grew 200 percent in the past 12 months.

The investigation, supported by an analysis from Harvard Business School researcher Ben Edelman, centers on how ShopMy handles attribution when a merchant runs multiple affiliate programs simultaneously. Most affiliate networks operate on a last-click basis, meaning the final affiliate link clicked before a purchase receives the full commission. But that standard breaks down when a brand participates in both ShopMy and a traditional affiliate network at the same time.

According to the investigation, ShopMy’s guidance to merchants instructs them to favor ShopMy affiliates and cancel commissions that would otherwise go to affiliates on other platforms. ShopMy’s stated rationale is that its affiliates have a more direct brand-to-creator connection. Edelman rejected that reasoning.

“ShopMy’s recommendation distorts competition,” Edelman wrote. “The more often payments through other networks are canceled, the less reliable those networks look to affiliates. Meanwhile ShopMy will have no such weakness.”

Edelman also noted that affected affiliates on other platforms are typically not told why their commission was reversed. They would not learn that ShopMy directed the cancellation.

At a 15 percent average commission rate on $1 billion in GMV, ShopMy affiliates earn roughly $150 million annually. Edelman calculated that if just 10 percent of sales involved double-payment or misdirected commissions, the financial exposure reaches eight figures. The networks most affected by merchant count are impact.com and Awin Global.

The allegations arrive as the broader affiliate industry is already under legal pressure. In December 2024, YouTuber MegaLag published a widely viewed video accusing PayPal’s Honey browser extension of replacing affiliate cookies at checkout, effectively stealing commissions from the creators who drove the original traffic. More than 25 lawsuits were consolidated as In re PayPal Honey Browser Extension Litigation in the Northern District of California. On June 22, 2026, the court denied PayPal’s motion to dismiss.

PayPal VP of corporate communications Josh Criscoe said the company disputes the allegations and will defend against them vigorously, adding that “Honey follows industry rules and practices, including last-click attribution.” Honey’s user base has fallen from roughly 20 million to approximately 12 million since the MegaLag video was published.

Both cases expose the same structural flaw. Last-click attribution assigns 100 percent of commission credit to whoever captures the final click before purchase, regardless of how many creators, publishers, or affiliates influenced the customer earlier. A 2025 industry analysis found 76 percent of brands and agencies are now investing in multi-touch attribution to address the problem. Only 29 percent of marketers report success using attribution to achieve strategic goals.

For DTC operators running affiliate programs across multiple networks, both situations raise a practical question: when your attribution rules conflict across platforms, which affiliate actually gets paid, and does that affiliate know why they did or did not receive their commission?

As platforms compete for a larger share of affiliate revenue, the rules governing who earns what are becoming a legal and operational liability for brands caught in the middle.