How we measure and charge

Effective date: 12 August 2026

Two things decide what you pay us: how a sale gets counted as coming from your advertising, and what happens once it has been. This page explains both. The binding version is in the shopAds Terms of Service, which prevails if anything here reads differently.

How a sale is counted

An order only counts as advertising revenue if the ad platform confirms that the order followed a click on your advertising. Orders that came from somewhere else, from your email list, from a customer who already knew you, from search results you did not pay for, are not counted, are not part of your return on ad spend, and never earn us a fee.

That confirmation does not happen instantly, and it does not happen in order. The ad platform can only confirm a match once the customer’s device or browser has reported to it first, and neither step runs to a schedule. A confirmation for Tuesday’s sale can reach us before one for the previous Thursday’s. This is true of every advertiser on every ad platform, and it is not something we or anyone else can speed up.

So each day is held open for a while after it ends, to let those confirmations arrive. That window is seven days, and your dashboard shows plainly which days are still open and which are settled. Once a day settles, its numbers never change again.

We count only the sales your advertising actually made

Ad platforms are graded on the sales they claim, and they grade themselves. Left on their default settings they will credit themselves with sales your advertising had little or nothing to do with, and the effect is not subtle: it is common for the sales an ad platform claims to exceed the total revenue a store actually took in that period, which is impossible, and is the clearest proof there is that the claiming has gone beyond what the advertising earned.

We measure your advertising the way an honest scorekeeper would, and that means turning down every setting an ad platform offers for claiming more.

We count clicks, not glances. Ad platforms can credit themselves for a sale when someone merely saw your ad and never clicked it, called view-through, and some also credit partial engagement such as a few seconds of a video watched. We ask each ad platform for the shortest click window and the least view-through crediting it allows, and where an ad platform lets us switch view crediting off entirely, we do. If somebody did not click, we do not count it.

We credit the click that brought the customer, not a share of every touch. Most ad platforms now default to spreading the credit for one sale across several of their own ads using a model of their own. Google calls this data-driven attribution and it is the default for new conversion actions; Meta and TikTok run comparable models. Those models are built by the same companies selling you the advertising, and they decide how much credit that advertising deserves. We use last click instead: the click immediately before the sale takes the credit, and that click either happened or it did not.

We use short windows. The longer the window between a click and a sale, the more sales an ad platform can claim. Google’s default click window is thirty days and can be stretched to ninety. Meta’s default is seven days of clicks plus a day of views and a day of engagement. TikTok offers windows out to twenty eight days. We standardise on seven days of clicks wherever an ad platform permits it.

One number, not several added together. When you advertise on more than one ad platform, each will happily claim the same sale, and adding their figures together counts that sale twice. We count each sale once. When more than one ad platform claims it, we compare the click identifiers recorded on that visit and the times they were recorded, and the credit goes to the ad platform whose click came last, because that is the click that brought the customer to the sale. Your return is then a real figure for your whole advertising programme, rather than the sum of several ad platforms marking their own homework.

We could measure the way the ad platforms do. It would make our work look far better than it is, and because our fee is a share of the revenue we are credited with, it would earn us more from you for exactly the same advertising. We measure strictly instead, for a reason that serves you before it serves us: decisions made on inflated figures are decisions made blind. Counting only the sales your advertising genuinely produced is what tells us which ads, and which ad platforms, are truly making you money, and that is what we act on when we move your budget around. Your fee is charged on that same honest number, so what we earn only ever grows when your store does.

How your fee is calculated

Everything above decides which sales count. This decides what you pay for them.

Our fee is 2 percent of the advertising revenue we generate for you, and it is worked out one day at a time, using the calendar day in your store’s time zone.

Once a day ends, what you spent on advertising that day is fixed. The revenue confirmed for that day keeps growing during its collection period. So a day’s return can only rise; it never falls.

A day carries no fee unless its return goes above 200 percent. Once it does, we call it a qualifying day, and it carries a fee of 2 percent of that day’s advertising revenue, which grows if more revenue is confirmed for that day. A day whose return never gets above 200 percent never qualifies, carries no fee at all, forms no part of anything you are charged, and is never revisited. Exactly 200 percent does not qualify: the return has to beat it.

Put plainly: if your ads do not beat 200 percent ROAS for the day, you do not pay.

What 200 percent actually means

A 200 percent return means your advertising brought in twice what you spent on it. It does not mean you doubled your money. Your cost of goods, your shipping, your staff and everything else still come out of that revenue.

When you get charged

The fees carried by your qualifying days build up as a balance, and that balance only goes up, because days that never qualify never contribute to it. There is nothing to reverse, nothing to credit back and nothing to refund, because nothing is ever charged that was not already earned.

We charge that balance when it reaches an amount worth charging, or after a maximum period, whichever comes first. Both are shown to you at onboarding and in your dashboard.

When a charge happens affects only the timing of your invoice, never whether a fee was owed. You are never charged for a day that did not beat 200 percent, whatever the timing.

What your invoice shows

One line: the shopAds management fee. Nothing else, because your advertising spend is paid by you directly to the ad platforms and never to us. Your dashboard lists the qualifying days that built the balance. Where a day has settled, its figures are final and you can check the arithmetic against them; where a day is still within its collection period, it is marked as such, because a charge can be made before every day in it has settled and those figures can still rise.

A few other things worth knowing

Refunds and returns. An order placed by one of your customers counts when that order is paid. A later refund, cancellation or return does not change advertising revenue we have already measured. It works that way in both directions, and it means neither of us goes back over old ground.

Your store’s time zone. Your store’s time zone is the calendar we use for your account, and the ad accounts we run for you are created to match it. That is fixed when those accounts are created and cannot be changed afterwards, so if you change your store’s time zone in Shopify, your spend and your orders start landing on different days and your fees stop lining up. We will tell you if we see it happen and ask you to change it back.

Cancelling. No lock-in and no cancellation penalty. Cancel whenever you like, and we stop your campaigns immediately, so no further advertising spend is incurred. Your final charge is the balance your qualifying days have already earned, and nothing beyond it.

Questions

Anything here you want explained, ask us at help@shopads.ai.