Last-click attribution: why the last link before checkout wins

On a cashback order, the store pays a commission to whoever sent the last click before you checked out. That's the whole rule, and it's called last-click attribution. Your shopping portal, a site that pays you cashback for starting a purchase there, only gets paid, and can therefore only pay you, if its link was the most recent one you followed. Most tracking quirks across the 44 portals we compare trace back to that one sentence.

How last-click attribution moves cashback money

A store runs an affiliate program to buy sales it might not otherwise get. When someone arrives through a partner's link, the store's affiliate network records the referral and, if a purchase follows, pays that partner a commission: normally a percentage of what you spend on your order. A cashback portal is one of those partners, and its business model is to hand you most of that commission back. That model is why portals can pay you at all, and it's also why the payment takes weeks to clear.

The network has to decide which partner earned the sale, because plenty of them are competing for it. In most affiliate programs, the answer is the last one you clicked. Not the first, not the most helpful, not the one that had the best rate. The last.

The portal's cookie is the network's record of who to pay, and whoever clicks last overwrites it.

Does cashback track the last click?

Yes, but only the last one. A portal is paid only if its link was the last one you followed before checkout.

What steals the last click

Anything that lands a newer referral between your click and your checkout takes the money with it.

• An extension popup you accepted. Cashback extensions offer to "activate" savings when you land on a store. Accepting one is a fresh click through that extension's own portal, which is now the last one.
• A coupon site opened mid-checkout. Clicking through from a coupon page is another referral, and the three tracking traps covers the code side in full.
• A second search. Coming back to the store an hour later through Google reassigns nothing to your portal, and can hand it to whoever ran the ad you clicked.
• Switching devices. The cookie lives in the browser you clicked in. Clicking on a laptop and buying on a phone means the phone never carried the referral at all.
• A hand-off into the store's app. On a phone, the site can pass you into the store's app, and the browser's referral doesn't follow. BeFrugal's own help pages say so plainly, and the three tracking traps before checkout walks through it.

Does a cashback extension popup steal the click?

Yes, if you accept it. The popup is doing exactly what you'd do by hand: clicking through its portal. Accept it and that portal is now last, which is fine if it's the portal you wanted and expensive if it isn't. The awkward case is having an extension for one portal installed while clicking through from another: the extension's offer to help is, mechanically, an offer to take over.

The clean habit is to pick your portal deliberately, click through, and then decline anything that pops up afterward.

How long does a portal click last?

Longer than a minute, shorter than you'd like, and nobody publishes a single number. The window is set by the store's affiliate program rather than by the portal, so it varies store by store as well as portal by portal. BeFrugal's help pages ask you to start with an empty cart. Capital One puts a hard 24 hours on its online offers. None of that generalizes into a rule you can apply everywhere.

Practical translation: treat a click as good for one sitting, in one tab, on one device. If you leave and come back tomorrow, click through again before you buy. Clicking through a second time costs nothing and resets the referral in your favor.

What last-click does not touch

It's worth knowing where the rule stops, because a lot of over-caution is wasted on layers it can't reach:

• Your credit card's rewards. The card earns on the transaction, full stop. No click involved, nothing to break. Portal and card pay separately on the same order; together they are the first two layers of the stack.
• Card-linked offers. Amex Offers, Chase Offers and Citi Merchant Offers track by the card transaction as well, which is why extensions and stray tabs are irrelevant to them. The full swipe-versus-click comparison lays out the card side.
• Store loyalty programs. Those run on the store's own account system, so they credit whichever door you came in through.

Only the portal layer is fragile. That's one of four layers on a well-stacked order, which is worth remembering before you talk yourself out of buying at all.

What we can and can't see from our side

We read each portal's own rate pages and record what they show, so we can tell you what a portal is offering and whether today's number is good for that store. We can't see your click. Nobody can except the portal, which is why the first step in any missing-cashback investigation is that portal's own click history (Rakuten calls it "Shopping Trips"). If you're signed in and have turned on click receipts, we save a click receipt each time you click out: the store, the portal, the rate we were showing, the terms, the time. It's what you quote in a claim, not proof the portal registered you.

What to do with this

1. Decide your portal before you start, from the store's page, rather than from whatever pops up while you shop.
2. Click through, then don't click anything else. No coupon hunt, no popup, no second search.
3. Finish in that tab, on that device, in one sitting. Coming back later means clicking through again.
4. If it still doesn't show up, work the missing-cashback process: wait at least a week first (BeFrugal and TopCashback both ask for 7 days), then file inside the portal's claim window. The full tracking guide walks through that recovery path in order.