Join Impact with your FreshStore store

impact.com (usually called Impact) is an affiliate platform used by many US brands, from home and electronics to software and courses. Walmart runs its programme on Impact too. It suits stores that recommend brands directly, mostly for US visitors. You open one partner account, and then apply to each brand.

What you need before you apply

• A live store with real content. Products on the homepage and a few helpful articles. Reviewers open your store, and an empty or unfinished store is often refused.
• A real email address that you check. Approvals and questions arrive there.
• Your store URL. Use your custom domain if you have one, because that is the address the reviewer checks.
• A short description of your store: what it covers and who it helps. Two or three sentences are enough.
• A mobile phone for the verification code.
• Your tax and payment details. Impact asks for them before it pays you.

Step-by-step: open your Impact account

1. Go to https://app.impact.com/login.user, choose Partner, then sign up with Apple, Google or Email.
2. Fill in Email, First / Last Name, Password (email sign-up only) and Mobile Number, then click Continue.
3. Enter the verification code Impact sends to your phone. In some regions it comes by email.
4. Check Country, Timezone, Currency and Account name. Choose your currency with care: it sets how you are paid and cannot be changed later.
5. Accept the Partner Program Agreement, choose your email preference, then click Continue and Confirm.
6. Work through the checklist. In Categorize your business, answer "I am", "Operating as", "Who promotes primarily through" and "Where I provide". In Connect your channels, add your store as a website and verify it. In Personalize your profile, check the details and click Next to send your account for review.

If Impact asks you to prove you own the store with a meta tag, add it with How to add Meta Tags and Custom Scripts.

How long approval takes

Impact reviews your partner account in up to 72 hours. Each brand then reviews you separately, with no fixed time. The brand emails you its decision, and a clock icon shows while it is still pending.

If you are refused, the brand decided your store is not a fit for now. Add content about that brand's kind of products, then apply again or try a similar brand. If your partner account itself is refused, contact Impact support and ask why.

Apply to brands

1. In Impact, go to Discover > Brands > All Brands.
2. Open the brand and click Apply.
3. Read the terms, add a short note about your store, and answer any questions the brand asks.
4. Click Apply. If the brand has more than one programme, choose the one for content websites.

Some brands do not show up in the list. Look for an "affiliate programme" link on the brand's own website. It opens the brand's Impact sign-up page; open it while you are logged in to Impact.

Get a link to a product

1. In Impact, click Create a Link.
2. Choose the brand, and paste the address of the product page on the brand's website into the landing page field.
3. Copy the link.

Another way: go to Discover > Find Products, set Program Relationship to My Brands, open the product and click Copy Tracking Link.

Impact links usually start with the brand name and a domain such as pxf.io or sjv.io, for example https://brand.pxf.io/c/.... Links to a product page need the brand to allow deep links. To check, go to Discover > My Brands, open the brand, and look at Details > How we track.

Add the link to your store as a custom offer

A Impact link goes into your store as a custom offer. The offer puts a buy button with your link on the product page. All the steps below are in your store admin at https://your-store-domain/admin.

For a new product

1. Go to Store > Products > Products and click New.
2. Fill in the product title, content and images.
3. In the Where to Buy (Custom Offer) section, paste your Impact link into Affiliate Link / URL.
4. Choose the Locale, add the price in Price (optional), and save.
5. Go to Store > Products > Offers and open the new offer to set the shop name and price note (see the fields below).

For a product you already have

Open the product, scroll to the Offers panel and click New. The Create a Custom Offer form opens. When you save, the offer is linked to that product.

The fields that matter for a Impact link

• Affiliate Link: your Impact link, exactly as Impact gave it to you.
• Shop Name: the name shown on the buy button, for example "Roborock". A tracking link from a network shows no shop name unless you fill this in.
• Price: the price on the shop's page today. Add Full Price only when the shop shows a discount.
• Price note: a few words beside the price, for example "from". "from" goes before the price ("from £89"). Anything else goes after it ("£89 per night"). Leave it blank for a plain price.
• Locale (under Settings on the right): choose All Locales if the brand delivers to most of your visitors. If it sells to one country only, choose that country. When all of a product's offers are custom offers for another country, visitors still see the buy button, with a line such as "Ships to the United States only" under it.

For every option on a custom offer, see the Custom Offers feature guide.

The tracking sub id: which store sent the click

Your store adds a tracking sub id to every Impact link by itself. You do not need to change the link. Impact calls this value Sub ID 1 (subId1 in the link). It shows in your Impact reports, so you can see which store sent each click and sale when one account serves several stores.

The default is your store's domain with a hyphen for each dot. For example, mystore.com becomes mystore-com.

To use your own value, go to Store > Settings > Offers, find the Custom Offers section and fill in Tracking sub id. Use letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores, up to 50 characters. Leave it blank to keep the default.

If your link already has its own subId1 value, your store leaves it as it is.

More detail is in the Offer Settings feature guide.

See your clicks

Go to Sales > Affiliate Clicks in your store admin. The Destination column shows the domain of the link each visitor clicked. For Impact links this is the brand's tracking domain, for example brand.pxf.io. Use the Destination filter to show only those clicks.

The domain is the network's, so all your Impact shops share it. To see the clicks for one shop, go to Store > Products > Offers, open the offer, and scroll to Affiliate Clicks. Your Impact reports show the same clicks, split by the tracking sub id. See the Affiliate Clicks feature guide.

Common problems

• My product link opens the brand's homepage. The brand has deep links switched off. Use Copy Tracking Link from Find Products, or ask the brand to switch deep links on.
• My Impact report shows no Sub ID 1. Your store adds it to links on pxf.io, sjv.io, evyy.net, 7eer.net, ojrq.net, goto.walmart.com and goto.target.com. Some brands use their own tracking domain. For those, add subId1=yourvalue to the link yourself.
• I chose the wrong currency. It cannot be changed after sign-up. Contact Impact support.
• The buy button shows no shop name. Open the offer and fill in Shop Name.
• The price on my store is out of date. A custom offer keeps the price you typed. Turn on Keep Custom Prices Fresh under Store > Settings > Offers and your store reads the price from the shop page about once a day. Pages it cannot read keep the price you entered, so check those now and then.