Phoebe Gates's app Phia sparks debate over sales commissions

Published: 2026-07-13T09:35:42.000Z

Phia was supposed to be the feel-good shopping startup, the one co-founded by Bill Gates's daughter Phoebe with an army of celebrity backers. Instead it has become the center of an ugly row over who really gets paid when you click buy, after cookie-stuffing allegations.

Phia was supposed to be the feel-good shopping startup, the one co-founded by Bill Gates's daughter Phoebe with an army of celebrity backers and a promise to save shoppers money. Instead it has become the center of an ugly row over who really gets paid when you click buy. A Bloomberg investigation, backed up by the affiliate researcher Ben Edelman and the rival tool Capital One Shopping, alleges that Phia's browser extension engaged in a practice called cookie stuffing, quietly claiming affiliate commissions on purchases it never actually generated. The fallout was swift, with the affiliate network Impact.com suspending Phia while it investigates. To understand the accusation you have to understand the plumbing of online shopping. Affiliate marketing is the invisible engine behind much of the web, where publishers, influencers and browser tools earn a cut whenever they genuinely steer a shopper to a retailer, each identified by a unique tracking code. The cardinal rule, as Edelman put it, is that a commission is only owed when a real user actually clicks a real link. What investigators say Phia did was override that rule. According to the testing, whenever a user reached checkout, the extension silently opened a hidden background tab, loaded its own affiliate link and swapped out whoever's referral code was legitimately there, even if the shopper had arrived directly or through a competitor. The examples cited are pointed. Across more than 50 retail sites including Walmart, Nike and Zara, and networks like Rakuten and Awin, testers say Phia inserted itself into the chain, in one case replacing Wirecutter's tracking code with its own after a user clicked through to Nordstrom. Capital One Shopping warned retailers bluntly that legitimate publishers were having revenue taken and advertisers were paying for clicks that never happened. Phia, founded only in 2025 and having raised more than 40 million dollars from investors including Kleiner Perkins alongside celebrities such as Khloé Kardashian and Hailey Bieber, blamed a bug, saying a recent code release had caused misattributions that its engineers fixed overnight. Bloomberg's retest confirmed the behavior had stopped, though whether that satisfies the retailers is another matter. The episode reopens a debate the region knows well, since browser shopping assistants and cashback tools have grown popular across the Gulf's booming e-commerce market, where platforms like noon, Amazon and Namshi run extensive affiliate and influencer programs. As the UAE and Saudi Arabia push digital commerce under Vision 2030 and their own strategies, the same question of attribution integrity applies, and regional retailers paying commissions to influencers and plugins have a direct stake in whether those referrals are honest. Phia's stumble is a reminder that in an industry built on invisible tracking codes, trust is the actual product, and it is remarkably easy to lose.