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: open any outbound link on the site — they all run through /go/{store}— and watch where it lands. It lands on the store’s plain domain, with no affiliate parameter attached, because the redirect only uses one when a store has claimed its profile and its owner has supplied it. 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 feed one list, and that list refuses to describe itself as demand until at least 200 clicks exist in the window. Below that it says so and shows top-scored stores instead.
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. The only list built from clicks is Most clicked, and it refuses to call clicks demand until there are at least 200 in the window.
- What do you collect about visitors?
- No cookies are set for a visitor — the site sets none at all. There is no advertising and no third-party tracker beyond Cloudflare's cookieless page-view counter. Outbound clicks through the registry are counted per product so the demand list can exist; 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.