How to post affiliate links & discount codes on Instagram
Here’s how to post affiliate links and discount codes on Instagram.
Shopify Collabs alternative: Avelon vs Shopify Collabs
If you’re running a Shopify store and looking beyond Shopify Collabs for affiliate and partnership marketing, you’re not alone. While Collabs has its place in the creator economy, it wasn’t built for brands that need editorial reach, attribution integrity and protection against coupon abuse.
This article breaks down what Shopify Collabs does well, where it falls short, and why premium brands like Rapha, COROS, Sigma Sports, Runderwear and 500+ more are choosing Avelon instead.
What is Shopify Collabs?
Shopify Collabs is an influencer marketing tool built directly into the Shopify admin. It handles the basics:
- Creator discovery
- Affiliate link generation (although they don’t drop cookies, they are just UTM links)
- Product gifting
- Discount code distribution
For small DTC brands getting started with influencer marketing, it’s a reasonable entry point.
But, for brands operating in the premium sports, outdoor, and lifestyle space – where editorial credibility, margin protection and accurate attribution matter – Collabs starts to show its limits.
It’s also worth noting that Shopify Collabs isn’t an affiliate platform. Affiliate platforms are designed to track user interaction over a period of time (attribution window) and attribute a sale back to the affiliate who recommended the product. Shopify Collabs does not do this and only works on first-touch and coupon code tracking.
Shopify Collabs is a basic influencer marketing tool.
How does Avelon differ to Shopify Collabs?
As we’ve touched on, Collabs is a basic influencer marketing tool – whilst Avelon is an affiliate platform (partnerships platform) built for influencers, content creators and publishers to drive growth with advanced promotion tools.
Avelon’s core functionality surrounds:
- Automating affiliate programs
- Advanced anti-bot / coupon leak tools and anti-fraud tech
- Access to the world’s best publishers (view our publishers here)
- 1000’s of verified, premium content creators
- In-platform gifting and tracking of gift usage
- Third-party integrations through Klaviyo + Zapier
- Automated payouts
Avelon has focused on making everything as simple as Collabs, but with more features, customisation and technology behind the scenes. Avelon is also has curated marketplace of affiliates to work with. Every single affiliate is manually verified by our team.
Shopify Collabs vs Avelon - feature breakdown
If you’re looking for a side-by-side comparison of Shopify Collabs vs Avelon, then see our simple breakdown below. You can also scroll to underneath this to see an in-depth breakdown.
Core features
Shopify Collabs
Avelon
Advanced attribution tools
Multi-touch attribution
Basic last-click
Recognised affiliate network
Registered with the APMA
Not recognised
Automated payouts
All payments are automated
Manual, in-platform
Gifting to creators
Gift directly to partners
Yes
Bulk & repeat cadence of gifts
Gift directly to partners
Branded sign up pages
Customise your sign up page
Seamless onboarding
Easy onboarding for partners & full email customisation with Klaviyo
No – reported difficult
1. Coupon codes leaks
This is the issue Shopify Collabs merchants talk about most: coupons getting leaked to coupon code sites and affiliates earning commission for no reason.
Collabs generates unique coupon codes for each creator, but those codes routinely end up on coupon aggregator sites like Honey, RetailMeNot, and Coupert. The result: customers who were going to buy at full price instead apply a leaked discount code at checkout, eroding your margins by anywhere from 4-15%.
Worse, the sale gets misattributed to whatever creator’s code was leaked – so you’re paying commission on a conversion that had nothing to do with that creator’s influence. One agency director publicly disclosed discovering over $50,000 per month in revenue overlap on a single Collabs client account, with commissions being double-paid across duplicate codes.
Shopify has tried to address this, but the fundamental architecture – distributing coupon codes to a largely unvetted creator pool – makes it structurally difficult to solve.
Avelon’s infrastructure is designed from the ground up to prevent coupon leakage. Rather than distributing discount codes into the wild and hoping for the best, Avelon uses proprietary link technology that maintains attribution integrity without exposing exploitable coupon codes.
This means your discount strategy stays under your control, your margins stay protected and commissions are paid only on genuinely influenced conversions.
2. Quality control
Shopify Collabs operates an open-access model. Creators apply, and merchants approve or reject them, but there’s limited vetting beyond follower count. As merchants in the Shopify App Store reviews have noted, many applicants are “SEO parasites” who create thin content sites, scrape product information, and insert their affiliate links – adding no genuine editorial value.
This means brands spend time filtering out low-quality applicants rather than building relationships with publishers who actually drive informed purchase decisions.
Every publisher, content creator and ambassador on Avelon is manually vetted and approved.
There are no cashback sites, no coupon aggregators, no browser extensions, no thin-content affiliates. Publishers include established editorial titles like Future PLC publications (Cycling Weekly, Cyclingnews, T3, Tech Radar), Conde Nast, Hearst, The Independent and 1000’s more.
This isn’t a volume play. It’s a quality play.
When your products appear in an Avelon-affiliated article, they appear in genuine editorial content that consumers actively seek out when making purchase decisions.
3. Basic attribution
Collabs uses straightforward last-click attribution via coupon codes and referral links. There’s no multi-touch attribution, no ability to understand how editorial content higher up the funnel contributed to a conversion that might have closed through a different channel. For brands investing in editorial partnerships alongside paid media and organic search, this creates blind spots in understanding true marketing ROI.
Our Split Level Attribution goes beyond simple last-click tracking.
It recognises that the editorial review a consumer reads three days before purchasing is a fundamentally different (and often more valuable) touchpoint than the last link they happened to click.
This gives brands genuine visibility into how editorial content drives revenue, and allows for fairer commission structures that reward the publishers creating the most influential content.
4. Refunds & returns
Collabs doesn’t deduct partial refunds from affiliate commissions. If a customer buys three items through a creator’s link and returns two of them, the creator keeps commission on the full order value. For brands with any meaningful return rate, this quietly bleeds margin.
Why pay a commission on a product that’s been returned? Avelon accepts all returns/part-returns and removes the commission from the total commission owed.
5. Publishers refuse to work with Collabs
Because Collabs isn’t a recognised affiliate network, nor does it have any attribution models, publishers will not work with Collabs (unless there is an upfront payment involved).
An affiliate network is classed as such because it tracks from the first-click, until the user makes a purchase within an attribution window.
Collabs uses UTM parameters and discount codes to track sales. This means that if a consumer clicks a referral link on Collabs and then doesn’t purchase in that session, the sale will not be attributed to the affiliate.
With the fastest payment transfers in the industry, advanced attribution tools which ensure publishers get paid fairly for their part in conversions and automatic link generation and injection, publishers across the globe opt to work with Avelon over other major affiliate networks.
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