In e-commerce, attribution loses 15–20% of orders – according to Sublime Analytics data. These are transactions that were completed and paid for, but where the analytics system cannot determine where the customer came from. Such orders default to the “Direct” channel – as if the customer landed on the site directly and bought without any contact with advertising.
In reality, a large share of these orders comes from paid channels. Their trail breaks at the final stage of the purchase – at the payment gateway. As a result, the budget is optimized on data that assigns sales to the wrong channel.
Why the path breaks right at checkout
A purchase journey in e-commerce rarely consists of a single click. The customer encounters the brand on social media, returns through search, switches devices, decides after a few days. Attribution handles these scattered paths well.
The problem appears at the last step. After clicking “Pay”, the customer moves to an external payment gateway – Stripe, PayU, Przelewy24, BLIK – and completes the purchase there. Often they never return to the thank-you page.
For the analytics system, that return is the signal that closes the transaction. Without it, the system cannot assign the order to a source, so it records it as “Direct”. The sale counts, but the channel that brought it in disappears from the data.
What Sublime does about it
Sublime links the order to its source already at the cart stage, before the customer moves to the payment gateway. The return to the thank-you page is no longer needed to close the path.
This is handled by the cart_id identifier. The moment a customer starts a purchase, Sublime attaches a unique number to the cart. If the store engine (Shopify, PrestaShop, Shoper) does not generate that variable on its own, Sublime creates it and appends it to the order as a parameter.
As a result, every completed order can be linked to the source that brought the customer in – even when they passed through the payment gateway and never came back to the site. The path stays complete, because it no longer depends on the return to the thank-you page.
Data from the implementation
Below is data from a client whose main acquisition channel is Google Ads. The cart_id implementation took place at the turn of December 2025 and January 2026.
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
| Revenue share – Direct | 19.3% | 14.0% | ↓ 5.3% |
| Orders share – Direct | 15.5% | 11.0% | ↓ 4.5% |
Direct shrank by more than 5%. Customers did not start behaving differently – the completeness of the data changed.
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
| Revenue share – Google Non-Brand | 35.4% | 44.6% | ↑ 9.2% |
| Orders share – Google Non-Brand | 39.6% | 47.0% | ↑ 7.4% |
Google Ads previously accounted for 35% of revenue. After implementation – nearly 45%. The channel took over transactions that had been unassigned or booked as “Direct”. These are the same orders and the same budget. The only thing that changed is that it is now clear which channel brought them in.
How this affects your business
Better attribution means different budget decisions, because:
- conversions go to the right campaign instead of to “Direct”,
- budget goes to the channels that actually sell, not the ones that only look that way,
- campaign goals can be set on real numbers,
- optimization algorithms get a fuller signal, so they work better.
It is worth being clear about what Sublime does not do: it does not generate new sales. It recovers the sales that were already made but were not visible in the data. The effect is a fuller picture of which channel actually drives sales.
Want to see how much of your revenue goes to “Direct” instead of the channel that really generated it?
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