Independence · DOC-0007
Who pays for this, and why it cannot buy a point
The word independent appears on almost every page here. It was the only claim on the site with nothing behind it — every audit line cites a source, and that one cited none. This page is its source.
What the registry earns today
Nothing. You can check it in about ten seconds: on any profile, open the store link or a product from its catalog — those run through /go/{store} — and watch where it lands. It lands on the store’s own page, with no affiliate parameter attached, because the redirect only uses one when a store has claimed its profile and its owner has supplied it. Links that cite a source, such as the product feed or a policy page, go straight to that page without passing through the registry. No store has claimed yet.
What it intends to earn
When a store claims its profile and switches on a partner program, clicks through the registry may earn a commission on that store’s own published terms. That is the model, and stating it up front is the point: a registry that may earn from clicks to the stores it scores owes you the mechanism by which those two things are kept apart.
Why money cannot reach the score
Every component and its maximum are published, and the components sum to the headline. The deploy gate re-checks that identity on each release against randomly chosen stores, so a number that did not come out of the formula would fail the build.
The formula →Verifying domain ownership adds exactly +15, the same for every store, at no cost. It never edits the audit text, never changes another component, and never removes a weakness.
How claiming works →The affiliate-programs table is sorted by the merchant's trust score, not by commission. A generous rate from a careless store ranks below a modest rate from a careful one, which is the opposite of how a paid directory would order it.
See the ordering →Outbound clicks rank nothing today. A ranking by clicks waits until a click can be attributed to a person, and a bigger count does not unlock it, since volume is exactly what a bot fleet supplies. Until then Most clicked shows products from the top-scored stores and says so.
Most clicked →What is refused
- ✕Paid placement or a purchased ranking position of any kind.
- ✕A paid verified tier or badge. Competitors sell these — Clutch charges yearly for a verified profile, G2 sells category placement — and it is the single most common way a directory's ranking stops meaning anything.
- ✕Sponsored entries mixed into a list without being labelled as such. There are none, labelled or otherwise.
- ✕Selling contact details of the businesses on record. Several Shopify directories sell founder emails; this one publishes records about stores, not leads for selling to them.
- ✕Removing a weakness for a fee, or at all except when the fact behind it is wrong.
Questions
- How does StoreProfiles make money?
- Today it makes none. Outbound links carry an affiliate parameter only when a store has claimed its profile and its owner has supplied one, and no store has claimed yet, so every outbound link goes to the plain store domain. Nothing on the registry is or has been sold: no placement, no verified badge, no ranking position, no sponsored entry.
- So what is the plan?
- When a store claims its profile and turns on a partner program, clicks through the registry may earn a commission on that store's own terms. That is the intended model and it is disclosed here rather than discovered later. It is also the reason the rest of this page exists: a registry that may earn from clicks to the stores it scores has to say exactly why the money cannot reach the score.
- Could a commission make a store score higher?
- No, and the reason is arithmetic rather than a promise. The score is computed from a store's public product feed and collected facts, each component published with its maximum, and the components sum to the headline number — an identity the deploy gate re-checks on every release. There is no field a payment could set. Claiming adds a fixed +15 and is available to every store for free; it never edits the audit text or any other component.
- Is anything ranked by what it pays?
- No. The affiliate-programs table is ordered by the merchant's trust score, deliberately not by commission — a high payout from a store that cannot keep its catalog photographed is the oldest trap in the field. Top stores are ordered by score. No list is built from clicks at all right now. Clicks are logged, but the registry cannot show a person made them: a fleet using ordinary browser user-agents logged 4,522 clicks on 2026-07-29 and 30,566 on 2026-07-30, peaking at 180 in a single minute, and another 3,109 on 2026-08-30, while no other day from 2026-07-17 to 2026-09-10 passed 64; requiring the full header set of a browser navigation left the rate at 26 a minute. Those are headless browsers, which send what a person's browser sends. So Most clicked ranks by trust score and says so, the profile and the owner dashboard hide their click counts, and the ranking returns when clicks can be attributed rather than when enough of them pile up — piling up is the easy part.
- What do you collect about visitors?
- Reading the site sets no cookie. Two cookies exist, both for store owners and set only when used: sp_claim holds the token while a store claim is being verified, and sp_owner keeps a verified owner signed in to the dashboard. There is no advertising and no third-party tracker beyond Cloudflare's cookieless page-view counter. Outbound clicks through /go are counted per store and product, so a demand list can be built once clicks can be attributed; they are not tied to a person.
If any statement on this page stops being true, it is a bug in the page, not a change of policy — report it from any profile and it gets corrected the same way a wrong audit fact does. The data behind the registry is public and re-checkable: the dataset.