Mantle Migration Lessons

Migrating a partner program off Mantle (or any platform) is mostly a data problem, and the data problem is almost always attribution. Here's what founders consistently run into, and how to land the migration cleanly.

Preserve every partner's referral codes

Partners have live links in client decks, blog posts, and email footers. If their mref/referral codes change in the move, those links break silently. The single most important migration rule: carry each partner's original code across so their existing links keep working.

The store-identifier trap

The most common migration failure: partners import fine, but their referred stores come across with no store identifier, so no revenue can attach. The dashboard shows a tiny number and everyone panics. The cause is usually a customers export that didn't include (or didn't join on) each store's myshopify domain — especially when the export spans multiple apps and only one is set up on the new platform.

What to verify first

1. Do partners' referral codes match their old links exactly?
2. Does every referred store have a real myshopify domain as its identifier — not a store name or custom domain?
3. After the first revenue sync, does attributed revenue look sane against your old numbers?
4. Are historical stores mapped to the right partner?

Reconciling a broken import

If revenue looks far too low, don't assume it's lost — it's almost always sitting in the raw transaction data, unattached because the store identifiers are missing. The fix is to rebuild the referrals from the platform's customers export (which has domain + partner per store), keyed on the myshopify domain, then re-sync. Revenue re-attaches automatically.

Set the right number expectation

Your new platform reports revenue from Shopify's Partner API — actual charges — which may differ slightly from your old platform's lifetime-value accounting. A small gap between the two is normal and correct; a huge gap means attribution didn't fully land.