How Glow works

Glow makes the products in your video clickable. You upload a video, point at the things in it you want to sell, and attach a product to each one. Glow follows each object through the shot, so a viewer can click the product where it actually is on screen instead of hunting for a link in your bio. The video plays on your own site through an embed, or on your Glow page.

One kind of account does all of this. Some people use Glow to sell products they make, and some run a store and use Glow to sell from it. The setup is the same either way.

1. Upload a video. It goes into your studio. Nothing is public yet.
2. Click an object in the frame. Glow tracks that object through the rest of the video. That takes roughly 30 to 60 seconds per object.
3. Attach a product. Either paste the product link, and Glow reads the title, price and image from the page, or pick the product from your connected Shopify store. You can edit the title and price afterwards.
4. Publish. Publishing puts the video on your Glow page and turns on every embed of it. Until you publish, only you can see it.
5. Embed it. The editor gives you a snippet to paste into your own site. It is an iframe, so it works on any page you can edit the HTML of. Your domain, your page, your layout.

When a viewer clicks a product, the card opens over the video and the video keeps playing. Clicking through from the card sends them to the product page you linked.

Two options right now.

• Your own link. Paste any product URL, including an affiliate link you already have with ShopMy, LTK, Amazon or anyone else. Glow sends the viewer there untouched and records the click. Sales on this route are reported by whoever runs that program, in their dashboard, not in Glow.
• A connected Shopify store. Connect the store once from your account page. Glow then reads the store's catalogue so you can pick products directly, and Shopify tells Glow when an order comes in. This is the only route where Glow can show you the sale.

Every click out to a store goes through a Glow redirect, which records which video, which product, and the exact second of the video the viewer clicked. That click gets an id, and the id rides along to the store.

On a connected Shopify store, Glow finds that id again on the order in one of two ways: Shopify passes it back on the order, or Glow recognises the first page of the shopping session as the link it sent the viewer to. When it matches, the order is credited to that video and that product, and it shows up in your Orders tab.

This is worth reading before you judge the numbers, because the honest version is less flattering than the usual one.

• The match needs the purchase to happen in the same browsing session as the click. If someone clicks on their phone and buys on a laptop a week later, that sale is real but Glow will not see it as yours.
• A connected store sends Glow all of its orders. Orders with no Glow click behind them are stored so an operator can reconcile them, and they are excluded from your totals. Glow does not claim credit for a store's existing business.
• Refunds and cancellations reverse the order. It stops counting, and the fee on it is credited back.
• An order counts as pending until 30 days have passed without a refund or cancellation, then it locks and is treated as final. A refund after that still reverses it.
• On your own affiliate links Glow sees the click and nothing after it. There is no way for Glow to know what those clicks sold.
• Glow shows sales and clicks, not people. Nothing here is deduplicated per human.

Glow takes 5% of the value of each order it attributes to one of your videos. Nothing else. There is no monthly fee, no upload fee, and no charge for videos that sell nothing.

The 5% is billed through Shopify Billing on the connected store, so it appears on the store's normal Shopify invoice rather than as a separate bill from us. Shopify requires the store owner to approve a spending limit before any of this can run, and nothing is charged until they click approve. If an order is refunded, the fee on it is credited back.

On your own affiliate links there is no Glow fee, because there is no order for Glow to see and nothing for Glow to bill against.

Your analytics show how many times a product was on screen, how many people clicked it in the frame, how many of those went through to the store, and the orders that came back. On the money side you see the order value and what you keep after Glow's fee. Glow does not show predicted or estimated earnings anywhere. If a number is on the screen, a store reported it.

Email davis@team8.co. What Glow collects and how long it keeps it is on the privacy and data protection page.