An LTK link is an affiliate link. LTK, formerly rewardStyle and LIKEtoKNOW.it, is a platform where creators keep a shoppable storefront of the products they have featured. When you tap one of their links, LTK records that the click came from that creator and forwards you to the retailer's own product page. You buy from the retailer as normal. If the purchase completes, the retailer pays the creator a commission out of its own margin.

Does buying through an LTK link cost more?

No. You pay the price the retailer is charging everyone else, and no fee is added at checkout for having arrived through a creator. The commission is paid by the retailer, not by you, and it comes out of the retailer's margin on a sale it would otherwise have had to pay to advertise for. LTK is free to use as a shopper.

Why do LTK links sometimes not work?

Because an affiliate link is a pointer into someone else's catalogue, and catalogues change. The four usual causes are: the product was delisted, so the retailer redirects that URL to a category page or its homepage instead of showing an error; the retailer rebuilt its site and rewrote every product URL; the retailer ended its affiliate programme, so the tracking link no longer resolves anywhere useful; or the post predates LTK's 2021 rebrand from LIKEtoKNOW.it and has been surviving on redirects for years.

How do I find a product when the LTK link is dead?

Take the product name and retailer from the LTK listing itself rather than from the link, because that text outlives the URL. Search the retailer's own site for that name first, then the brand's site directly, since a retailer can drop a product the brand still sells. If neither has it, reverse-image search the LTK thumbnail: it is usually the retailer's own product photo, which is clean, well lit and already indexed, so it searches far better than a frame grabbed from a video.

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What an LTK link actually is, and why it breaks

August 19, 2026 · 6 min read

A clay-style shop storefront with a rounded awning

An LTK link is an affiliate link. You tap it, LTK notes that the click came from that creator, and it hands you to the retailer's own product page, where you pay the same price the retailer is charging everyone else. If you buy, the retailer pays the creator a commission out of its own margin. Nothing is added to your total.

That is the whole mechanism. The rest of this is the part that actually affects you: why a link that worked in March lands you on a homepage in August, and what to do when it does.

The chain, one hop at a time

What looks like one tap is four things happening in about a second.

You tap a liketk.it link or a storefront listing. The storefronts live on shopltk.com; the short liketk.it form is the one that gets pasted into captions and comments.
LTK logs the click against that creator and drops a tracking cookie so a purchase you make later can still be traced back to them.
You are redirected to the retailer's product page. Not an LTK page. A department store, a beauty retailer, a brand's own Shopify shop, whoever actually sells it.
You check out with the retailer. Their card form, their shipping, their returns policy. LTK is not holding your money and cannot help you return anything.

Attribution is last-click, which is why the cookie matters. Buy two weeks after the tap and the creator usually still gets credit. Tap somebody else's link in between and they do not. The window varies by retailer rather than being one LTK-wide number, commonly somewhere between a week and a month.

You are not paying an influencer tax

This is the suspicion people arrive with, and it is worth putting down plainly. The commission is a marketing cost the retailer was going to spend anyway. Paying a creator a cut of a sale that actually happened is cheaper and better targeted than buying ads at strangers, which is the whole reason affiliate programmes exist. Rates are set by each retailer, not by LTK, and the figures cited around the industry usually sit in the region of 10 to 25 percent. Your total is the same either way.

The honest limit is not price. It is coverage. A product with no affiliate programme behind it earns nothing, so it tends not to get linked at all, which is why the thrifted jacket and the vintage lamp stay mysteries while the moisturiser gets a storefront entry the same day. That is worth knowing when your comment goes unanswered, and it is the same economics behind why creators never reply to “link?”.

Why the link stops working

An affiliate deep link is a pointer into somebody else's catalogue, and catalogues are rewritten constantly. Four things break them.

The product was delisted. Most retailers redirect a dead product URL to a category page or the homepage rather than serving an error, which is why you land somewhere plausible and useless instead of somewhere obviously broken.
The retailer rebuilt its site. A replatform rewrites every product URL at once. Every deep link anyone ever made into that store dies on the same afternoon.
The retailer left the programme. When a brand ends its affiliate relationship, the tracking link has nothing left to resolve to.
The post is older than the rebrand. rewardStyle and LIKEtoKNOW.it were consolidated into LTK in 2021. Links embedded in blog posts and captions before that have been surviving on redirect chains for years, and chains fray.

None of that is LTK being careless. It is what happens to any link that points at a product page, including the ones you bookmark yourself. Storefronts also decay quietly for a duller reason: they are ordered by recency and maintained by one busy person, so the item from a particular video sinks and nobody goes back to check whether it still resolves.

What to do when it dies

In this order, because each step is cheaper than the one after it.

Read the listing before you tap. The product name and the retailer are written on the LTK card. That text outlives the URL, and it is the thing you actually need. Screenshot it.
Search the retailer's own site for that name. If the product exists, this is one search and you are done. Site search finds items whose URL changed.
Then the brand's own site. A retailer can drop a line the brand still makes. It is discontinued at that shop, not discontinued.
Date-match the storefront. Storefronts run newest first, so scroll to the week the original post went up rather than hunting the whole grid.
Reverse-image the LTK thumbnail.It is usually the retailer's own product photo: clean background, even lighting, already indexed. That searches enormously better than a frame you paused out of a video.

If all five come back empty, the item is probably gone rather than hidden, and the useful move is to switch from finding it to finding what replaced it.

What LTK is genuinely good at

It solved a real problem. Before storefronts, the answer to “where is that from” lived in a reply that scrolled away in an hour. LTK gave creators one durable page they could fix later, and a shopper can browse it by creator, which is exactly how people shop when they trust a particular person's taste. It has been running in some form since 2011. That is a long time for a link platform.

Its limit is structural. LTK can only show you what a creator chose to post there. It is organised around people, not around the specific video you just watched, so the item from that video is somewhere in a feed of hundreds and nothing connects the two. And if the creator never posted it, or posts on a platform they do not link from, LTK has no answer to give you. There is no version of the app where it finds something nobody uploaded.

The version that does not need the storefront

Every route above depends on somebody else having done something first: the creator posting the item, the retailer keeping the URL alive, the affiliate relationship still existing.

Stealsy starts from the video instead. Share a TikTok or a reel to the app and it works from the footage itself, listening to the audio, reading the on-screen text and the caption, and checking the creator's storefront as one signal among several rather than as the whole answer. Every shop link it returns has been opened and checked as alive and about the right product before it reaches you, which is a direct answer to the problem this whole post is about.

Worth saying plainly, since this is a post about commissions: Stealsy uses no affiliate links. The shop you get is the one the evidence points at, not the one that pays the most.

Get Stealsy for iPhone — free to try, and every link is opened before you see it.

Common questions

What is an LTK link?: An LTK link is an affiliate link. LTK, formerly rewardStyle and LIKEtoKNOW.it, is a platform where creators keep a shoppable storefront of the products they have featured. When you tap one of their links, LTK records that the click came from that creator and forwards you to the retailer's own product page. You buy from the retailer as normal. If the purchase completes, the retailer pays the creator a commission out of its own margin.
Does buying through an LTK link cost more?: No. You pay the price the retailer is charging everyone else, and no fee is added at checkout for having arrived through a creator. The commission is paid by the retailer, not by you, and it comes out of the retailer's margin on a sale it would otherwise have had to pay to advertise for. LTK is free to use as a shopper.
Why do LTK links sometimes not work?: Because an affiliate link is a pointer into someone else's catalogue, and catalogues change. The four usual causes are: the product was delisted, so the retailer redirects that URL to a category page or its homepage instead of showing an error; the retailer rebuilt its site and rewrote every product URL; the retailer ended its affiliate programme, so the tracking link no longer resolves anywhere useful; or the post predates LTK's 2021 rebrand from LIKEtoKNOW.it and has been surviving on redirects for years.
How do I find a product when the LTK link is dead?: Take the product name and retailer from the LTK listing itself rather than from the link, because that text outlives the URL. Search the retailer's own site for that name first, then the brand's site directly, since a retailer can drop a product the brand still sells. If neither has it, reverse-image search the LTK thumbnail: it is usually the retailer's own product photo, which is clean, well lit and already indexed, so it searches far better than a frame grabbed from a video.