Before the allegations of cookie stuffing, Phia promised its customers they would never overpay. But does “transparent shopping” actually exist?
Phia’s entire pitch to shoppers fit into three words: never overpay again. Install the browser extension, and an AI assistant would compare a product’s price across every retailer selling it, surface secondhand versions for less, and make sure whoever was shopping got the better deal, every time. What Bloomberg’s investigation published in July found the company allegedly doing instead was opening invisible browser tabs during a shopper’s checkout and overwriting the referral codes of other affiliates, the publishers, creators, and platforms who had actually done the work of sending that shopper there, so Phia could collect the commission for itself.
The company, founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni and backed by investors including Hailey Bieber, Kris Jenner, Sara Blakely, Michael Rubin, and Sheryl Sandberg, was suspended from the affiliate platform Impact.com the following day. Bloomberg reported that Gates and Kianni had known about the practice since December, roughly seven months before it became public, and that it had been a feature engineers could toggle on and off, not the bug the company first described.
Gates and Kianni, who met as Stanford roommates, launched Phia in April 2025 as an eight-person startup pulling resale data from Depop, Poshmark, The RealReal, Vestiaire Collective, and eBay. “A young woman who’s hustling,” Gates told Fortune, describing the customer Phia was built for. “She shops like a genius, but she doesn’t want to waste her time doing it.” The whole premise was that the app would do the tedious, honest work of comparison shopping so its user didn’t have to, and would do it in the user’s interest rather than its own.
That’s the part of the story that’s already been told. The more interesting question is whether transparent shopping was ever a real thing to begin with, or whether transparency is simply a claim a company gets to keep making for as long as nobody checks it against what the company is actually doing.
“It’s really disappointing for publishers, brands, and creators who rely on the affiliate ecosystem to run their businesses,” Kate Sanner, founder and CEO of the resale shopping platform Beni, told Ethos over email. “The health of the affiliate world depends on trust that everyone is playing by the rules. When that trust erodes it introduces uncertainty and makes marketers question whether affiliate is the right place to invest, which ends up hurting everyone.” Sanner runs Beni, a company in the same category as Phia, helping consumers find secondhand deals.
Fashion has tried to measure that foundation of transparency for years. Fashion Revolution’s Fashion Transparency Index scores 250 of the world’s largest brands and retailers on how much they disclose about their supply chains, defining transparency as the public disclosure of information that enables people to hold decision-makers to account. The most recent published results put the average score at 26 percent, up two points from the year before. OVS topped the list at 83 percent. Gucci came in at 80 percent. Eighteen brands scored zero. Fashion Revolution is careful to note that a high score doesn’t mean a brand is ethical or sustainable, only that it discloses more than its competitors. Being more transparent than the industry’s least transparent names is a low bar, and most of fashion still isn’t clearing it, without needing to hide invisible tabs to fail.
Everlane tried to make transparency the entire brand rather than a score to improve on. When it launched in 2010, its pitch was to show customers exactly what a garment cost to produce, factory by factory, markup included, so a shopper could see precisely what they were paying for beyond the fabric. It worked, for a while. Then, in the spring, Shein acquired Everlane for a reported $100 million, down from a valuation that had approached $600 million at the brand’s peak. “This isn’t just a business deal, it’s a collision of narratives,” Sunny Bonnell, co-founder and CEO of the branding firm Motto, told DesignRush. “Acquisitions don’t just transfer assets. They transfer associations.” A company that spent fifteen years selling the idea that customers deserved to know everything is now owned by one that has spent about as long being accused of showing them as little as possible.
None of this makes Phia unique so much as current. Cookie stuffing, the practice Phia is accused of, isn’t new and isn’t confined to fashion. PayPal’s Honey extension, installed by tens of millions of browsers as a coupon finder, was accused in a class-action lawsuit of intercepting affiliate commissions that belonged to creators who had actually driven the sale. Nike sued the sneaker resale platform StockX after buying 60 pairs of shoes through the site and finding that 38 were fake, despite StockX’s marketing promise to verify every pair before it shipped. The two companies settled in August 2025, with StockX countering that the disputed pairs amounted to roughly 0.0004 percent of the 17.8 million Nike sneakers it had reviewed by then. Each onf these is selling the same underlying promise: trust the system, and it will make sure a shopper gets what they’re owed.
Sanner sees the Phia allegations less as a scandal than as a specific, identifiable failure inside a system that mostly works when it’s followed. “Attribution in marketing is always a challenge, but this is a unique violation of the affiliate industry rules,” she said. “Affiliate marketing is a great way to reward the publisher, creator or platform that genuinely helped someone discover a product. However, the allegations around Phia is that they were claiming credit for sales they didn’t influence. This distorts attribution and introduces uncertainty around who is actually responsible for driving value to the advertisers.”
“Technology is not the problem,” Sanner said. “Affiliate models work when they credit the party that actually helped a consumer find something or make a decision. Again, if the allegations are accurate, the issue is using that technology to claim credit without earning it in the first place.”
What Sanner argues for instead is enforcement. “There are already clear rules about what qualifies for commission and there should be regular audits to make sure those rules are being followed,” she said. “A commission should be tied to a real, consumer-initiated referral, not a hidden tracking mechanism that appears before checkout.” That’s a narrower, more testable standard than anything the Fashion Transparency Index measures, but it’s also partly why it’s notable that a company could still allegedly fail it for seven months before anyone outside the company caught on.
According to Sanner, it raises the bar on integrity in business. “People should understand what an extension is doing in the background and trust that it’s abiding by the rules of the industry,” she says. “Shoppers understand that their favorite creators and publishers use affiliate links as a way to monetize their influence and shoppers want to ensure that those creators are getting the credit they deserve.” That expectation is what makes Everlane’s factory tours, StockX’s authentication process, and Phia’s price comparisons all versions of the same offer: a shopper hands over some trust, and the platform is supposed to hand back an honest accounting in return. But what determines whether that accounting is real once no one’s checking?
It begs the question does transparent shopping exist? The answer isn’t straightforward. Transparency does exist, in pieces, unevenly, and mostly by accident of enforcement rather than design. Fashion Revolution can only report what companies choose to disclose. Nike had to buy 60 pairs of its own shoes and count the fakes itself. Bloomberg needed someone inside Phia willing to hand over internal messages before “we fixed the bug” turned into a toggle switch with a paper trail. Transparency, it turns out, is largely something companies get caught not having, rather than something they build and maintain on their own.
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