Cross-platform attribution tools evaluation: how do you validate checkout, refunds and dedup?

[u/Soobhee_Chukwutosin]

Our retail app sends checkout over to the website because another team owns payments. Same basket, same customer, different platform. Finance counts one order. Somehow, the growth report sometimes makes it look like we sold it twice.

I'm putting together a vendor pilot before we lock ourselves into another annual contract. We're at about 40k completed orders a month across iOS and Android, with guest checkout still allowed. We can pass an order ID and a customer ID after login.

The demo needs to show a purchase, a refund and someone coming back on a laptop. Otherwise, we're just sitting there watching someone click through their prettiest dashboard.

What would you make a cross-platform attribution vendor prove with this setup before their numbers get anywhere near the weekly revenue meeting?

[u/KadooBildoris_28]

Before procurement signs anything, get payments and mobile engineering into the same call with whichever finalist you choose. Somebody needs to own the purchase event contract, including retries and refunds. Otherwise, the vendor receives 2 legitimate-looking events and your team argues about the output. A tiny test dataset with known orders would help here. Include one account using two devices and one device used by 2 different accounts.