Kratom, CBD, knives, alcohol, vape, firearms accessories — if Meta and Google won't take your money, a pixel has nothing to attribute. Your orders come from Reddit, forums, Discord, creators and word of mouth, and the only system that can see them is the buyer. So toldby asks them.
Attribution tools report on demand that passed through an ad platform. In a restricted category, almost none of yours does.
You never ran the campaign, so there is no click to match. The order arrives tagged direct or organic — which is true, and tells you nothing you can spend a day on. Meanwhile the thread that actually sold it is sitting in a subreddit you have never read, and the affiliate quietly sending you a tenth of your revenue looks identical to a bookmark.
The gap isn't modelling. It's that nobody asked. One question on the Thank You page, while the buyer still remembers, recovers the part no amount of pixel maths can reconstruct — and because it is an answer rather than an inference, it comes with the order, the customer and the revenue attached.
Ten sources chosen for stores that can't buy ads — and a follow-up on every one of them where the answer is a name.
Every follow-up someone writes also goes into the AI digest — themes, sentiment, and quotes word for word. Pro.
“Someone in r/kratom said yours was the only vendor with real lab results so I tried it.”
“Ordered Thursday, had it Saturday. Nobody else in this space ships that fast.”
A pixel reports on traffic that passed through an ad platform. If Meta and Google won't run your category, almost none of your demand ever touches one — it arrives from a subreddit thread, a Discord, a forum post or a friend. The pixel isn't wrong about those visits; it never sees them, so the channel that actually sold the order shows up as direct or organic.
One multiple-choice question on your Shopify Thank You page: how did you first hear about us? The ready-made community template lists ten sources chosen for stores that can't buy ads — Reddit, a forum or Discord, a friend, a review or blog post, YouTube, a podcast, an affiliate or coupon site, a search engine, in person, other.
Yes — that is what the template is built for. Every option where the answer is a name carries an optional follow-up box, so a buyer who picks Reddit can type the subreddit. Your analytics page then rolls those names up under the option they came from: Reddit 34, and underneath it r/kratom 18, r/CBD 9. Spellings are folded together, so r/Kratom and r/kratom count as one place.
toldby doesn't touch your products or your listings. It adds a survey to the Thank You page your buyers already reach after checkout, so whatever you sell is between you, Shopify and your payment provider exactly as it was before.
No. toldby runs on Shopify's Checkout UI Extensions, so there are no theme edits, no scripts on your storefront and nothing to deploy. Install free, pick the community template, publish — the next order sees it.
The survey and the answers are free, and collection is never capped. Free shows you the last 24 hours of them; Pro is a flat $6/mo (or $50/year) for the full history and the AI summaries. See the pricing page for the whole model.
More on the model in pricing, more about the app in the FAQ, and if you are coming off a survey tool that shut down, the Delighted migration guide.
toldby is live on the Shopify App Store. Install free, publish the community template, and find out which thread has been selling for you.
Install free on Shopify