Back to the RevenueCat homepage
Log in
Contact salesSign up

Chapter 5: User identity: connecting the web purchaser to the right app account

Connecting the person making the purchase with the person using your app is (unsurprisingly) critical to any acquisition campaign. With web-to-app, this is trickier because the web purchase and app access happen in different environments — meaning you need to handoff the web purchaser identity to RevenueCat, so that the payee identity is connected to the customer identity who opens the app.

Without this handoff, the app purchase may not unlock, revenue may remain attached to an anonymous customer, and purchase-to-app redemption becomes unreliable.

These three handoff methods are equally effective — choose one based on what you know about the visitor before checkout:

Handoff method

When to use

Guidance

Known App User ID

Use this when the visitor is already logged in or arrives from an authenticated lifecycle campaign

- A RevenueCat Funnels URL can include the App User ID

- The identifier must be stable and safe to expose; don't use an email address, phone number, or other personal information

Authentication inside the Funnel

Use a RevenueCat authentication step when the visitor should sign in or create an account before checkout

- RevenueCat supports Firebase Authentication, OpenID Connect, and external authentication

- Test successful sign-in, cancellation, expired state, existing accounts, and duplicate-account prevention

Anonymous purchase and Redemption Link

Use for cold paid traffic, or as the default for creator and affiliate campaigns

- RevenueCat creates an anonymous customer at purchase and provides a one-time Redemption Link that associates the purchase with the customer in the app

- Redemption Links expire after 60 minutes, so the success experience and purchase email must give the customer an immediate, obvious way to install or open the app

Whichever identity path you use, test that the purchase lands on the intended RevenueCat customer and that the app unlocks the correct entitlement. For campaign measurement, purchase-to-app redemption is the key handoff metric.

RevenueCat saves funnel responses (from choice and text inputs, referenced on later screens through variables such as {{ input.goal }}) as customer attributes, viewable in the Responses view. Breaking down funnel analytics by response value isn't available just yet (this feature is coming soon), so if you currently need that kind of segment for reporting, represent it with a stable URL parameter instead, or send funnel events to product analytics.