Affiliate marketing has spent years adding new partner types. Publishers were joined by voucher sites, cashback platforms, influencers and, more recently, AI-powered shopping services. The list keeps getting longer, which says something about how broad the word ‘affiliate’ has become.
The latest category emerging as an essential part of this system is Brands as Publishers, aka Brand Partnerships. That sounds slightly strange because brands are supposed to sit on the merchant side of the relationship. They pay affiliates. They do not usually get described as affiliates or publishers themselves, but once one retailer starts sending customers to another, and gets paid when those customers convert, the distinction becomes academic.
Retailers are also looking much harder at what their marketing spend is actually driving and searching for greater efficiency. Vogue Business recently investigated the problem of multiple partners claiming credit for the same sale, which is hardly a new complaint but has become much harder to ignore as customer journeys get messier. A shopper might have seen a creator, searched on Google, clicked a paid social ad, encountered a cashback site and then used a voucher code before buying. Several parties can point to that transaction and say they contributed.
Perhaps they did. Maybe some of them did. Maybe the customer was going to buy anyway. That last possibility is the awkward one. A truly incremental sale is one that would not have happened without that specific marketing activity or partner. It is a much more useful measure than simply asking which channel happened to be nearby when the order was placed.
Customer acquisition is not getting cheaper either. Meta is passing digital services tax costs on to advertisers in several European markets. Digiday’s 2026 holiday research found 81% of retailers are holding the line on deeper discounting this year to protect margins. It’s fair to say that brands are heading into Q4 with the usual pressure to sell more, but with less enthusiasm for paying more for cold traffic or giving more margin away.
One answer may be to look harder at customers who have already proved they are willing to buy. Some brand-to-brand partnership models are built around exactly that. Somebody buys from one retailer and, once that purchase is complete, they are shown an offer from another brand, typically on the checkout confirmation or post-purchase page. If they then go on to buy from the second retailer, that retailer pays for the acquisition on a performance basis.
It is not especially glamorous, which may be part of the reason it has received less attention than creators or social commerce. But commercially it makes a lot of sense. A customer who has just bought something is not the same as somebody being interrupted midway through scrolling Instagram. They have already demonstrated purchase intent. They have completed a transaction. At that moment, they are in that crucial buying mindset.
Why the thank-you page deserves another look
The thank-you page has traditionally been treated as the end of the journey, displaying an order number, delivery details, or maybe a prompt to create an account. It has not exactly been treated as premium marketing real estate.
But it is possible to get the thank-you page wrong. For instance, some retailers simply fill post-purchase pages with generic discounts or empty referral programs and call it monetisation. That quickly becomes a sort of low-level numbers game where a tiny conversion rate is treated as a positive result simply because the traffic was cheap enough. Nobody needs that.
A better version is closer to recommendation. Somebody has just bought from Brand A, but that single order says relatively little on its own. The offer they see next should draw on all purchases we've observed that user make, often across many different retailers. That gives Brand B a much clearer idea of what that shopper might be interested in next, and a chance to reach them while they are still in buying mode.
In a recent campaign we ran with grüum, 13% of shoppers who requested a voucher went on to redeem it; an encouraging sign that shoppers respond to a well-matched offer at this point in the journey.
The incrementality question
A conversion can look excellent and still tell you very little about whether the marketing created demand or simply intercepted it. Affiliate marketing has always had some version of this problem. The industry became very good at tracking clicks and attributing revenue, but attribution is not the same as causation.
Brand-to-brand partnerships start from a stronger position on this. A shopper who sees an offer on another retailer’s thank-you page has not actively gone looking for that brand; they are discovering it after making a different purchase, which is quite different from someone searching for a voucher code for a brand they may already have decided to buy from. It still does not prove that every subsequent purchase is incremental, but it creates a much cleaner starting point for testing incrementality than many of the convoluted customer journeys marketers are dealing with elsewhere.
Discounting complicates things further. Retailers know vouchers work, particularly with price-sensitive shoppers. They also know what happens when discount codes leak across sites for which they were not meant: codes end up on voucher sites or shared from person to person, and margin disappears on sales that may well have happened at full price.
A truly 100% closed partnership network gives brands more control over that. A directed, personalised offer can be shown to a defined group of shoppers rather than published openly. There’s still margin and commission to take into account, obviously, but it can be used with much more precision.
Essentially, merchants can now play a role once reserved for publishers. They are not going to replace paid social media, creators or traditional affiliates, and they do not need to. Retailers just have more reason than ever to find acquisition that is measurable, relatively efficient and less dependent on either bidding harder for the same audiences or discounting more aggressively.
A customer who has just bought from another retailer is, in that context, an interesting person to meet. And the thank-you page, which has traditionally been the end of the transaction, is a valuable piece of marketing real estate - the beginning of another customer journey.
But its value is not only in acquiring someone new. Used well, the post-purchase moment rewards the customer, improving satisfaction, strengthening customer retention and, ultimately, their lifetime value.
