ShareASale to Awin: what changes for validation

If you ran a ShareASale programme, you now run an Awin programme. The platform closed on 6 October 2025.¹

Most of the account came across by itself. What did not is the part nobody migrates — your routine. The date your commission settles, the word for taking it back, the file you upload and the name of your order column are all different now. This page is that list, and nothing else: every fact below comes from Awin's own advertiser help centre.

What actually moved, and when

Awin's upgrade FAQ for ShareASale advertisers says your live offers carry over with their start and end dates, cookie periods stay the same, your existing payment setup and auto-deposit details carry over, your account balance transfers once the upgrade completes, and the account gets a new Awin MID.² The post-upgrade checklist Awin publishes has five items, and the third one is the reason you are reading this: "Understand Awin's validations process".¹

So the things worth checking are the ones that were never yours to move.

Lock date to auto-validation period

This is the change that costs money if you miss it.

On ShareASale, "the current default setting is for all valid transactions to lock on the 20 of the month following the month in which a sale tracked" — a January sale locked on 20 February.² The deadline was a date, and the same date for the whole month.

On Awin it is a window per sale. Awin puts it plainly: "Instead of sales locking on the 20th of each month, your transactions will be automatically approved after a specified period, unless you manually approve or decline them beforehand."³ For upgraded accounts, "all upgraded accounts will be set to a 50-day auto validation period", counted from the day the sale tracked; Awin's own worked example is a sale tracked on 1 January that auto-approves on 19 February. If you were on a custom lock period, it converted to the equivalent auto-validation period.²

Three practical consequences:

Every day is now a deadline. Under the old rule, a sale on 1 January and a sale on 31 January both had until 20 February — about fifty days for one and twenty for the other. Under the new rule both get fifty days, from their own tracking date. That is fairer, and it means a monthly review on a fixed date no longer lines up with anything. Pick the day from the period instead: the monthly validation checklist has the arithmetic.

Fifty days is not your returns window. It is the number Awin applied at upgrade. If your published returns policy is 60 days, the commission on a December return is approved before the customer's right to return has expired. Awin's own advice is the returns period plus about seven days, and on Awin Access the ceiling is 67 days.⁴

Check what your programme actually says. Awin's FAQ describes the rule applied at the upgrade, not your account today. The period is a programme setting agreed with Awin, and it cannot be switched off.⁴ Read it in your programme settings before you plan a routine around fifty days.

The words changed too

Awin publishes a glossary for exactly this. The rows that matter on a validation day:⁵

There is no row for void. Awin's word is decline, and the one place the old word still turns up in the upgrade documentation is the plugin feature that stopped working: "order auto-void".⁶ What a void looked like inside the ShareASale interface, and what its file format was, is not documented anywhere we can cite — ShareASale's own help went offline with the platform — so this page does not describe it.

Declining a return on Awin

Awin splits it in two, and which one you pick changes what the publisher sees.

• A full refund or a cancellation is a decline. Awin lists cancelled or fully returned orders among the legitimate reasons, along with a sale from the wrong marketing source, a programme terms violation such as unauthorised voucher code use, an order that cannot be fulfilled, and fraud.⁷
• A partial refund is an amend. You change the sale amount to what the customer kept and Awin recalculates the commission from it. You cannot amend the commission directly; commission-only changes go through Awin support.⁸
• In bulk, it is a CSV. Awin Classic takes a batch file at Commission → Validate → Batch Process Commission → Manual Upload, from the Accepted, Declined and Amended templates on that page, saved as a .csv.⁹ Awin's file rules matter more than they look — hard-coded values with no formulas, the date format for your programme's locale — and afterwards you open Batch Process History and filter for Failed rows, because "incorrect locale formatting, missing required columns, formulas in cells, or headings left in the file" are what Awin names as the common causes.⁸ The step-by-step version is how to decline Awin commissions for returns.
• After approval there is no second chance on Access. Awin Access: "Approved commissions can't be reversed", and support reverses them only in exceptional cases. On Accelerate and Advanced, support can reverse a commission if you send the order reference, the commission date and the validation date. On every plan, commission already paid to the partner is gone.¹⁰

Your Shopify tracking is the part to check

If your store used the ShareASale Shopify app, this is the section to act on.

"Currently, ShareASale plugins are in maintenance-only mode. Tracking continues, but updates and advanced features (such as order auto-void and product feeds) are no longer available."⁶ Read that twice: tracking keeps working, which is exactly why nobody notices — but order auto-void is gone, so refunds that used to come off by themselves now sit in your pending list waiting for you.

Awin's replacement is its own Shopify app, installed from Support → Integration → Tracking Installation Guide → Shopify. Once tracking is live, its Features tab has an Order Auto Validation checkbox with a required Order Validation Period.⁶ That automation has limits worth knowing before you rely on it: Awin's Shopify auto-validation declines cancellations and adjusts partial refunds and returns, but only on Awin Classic, only on a domain Awin has whitelisted, only for orders placed after activation, and in delayed batches.¹¹

Two cleanups belong in the same session. Uninstall the ShareASale Shopify app, and if your store had manual tracking, remove the old ShareASale code from Settings → Checkout → Order status page → Additional Scripts and any ShareASale pixel under Settings → Customer events → Custom pixels.⁶ While both are live you can see the same order twice: "While testing, you may briefly see duplicate transactions as both ShareASale and Awin tracking run simultaneously… You can simply reject these transactions under Commission → Validate → Validate Pending Transactions."⁶

If you had ShareASale API scripts

Anything automated against the ShareASale API needs rewriting rather than re-pointing. Awin's own comparison lists the differences: authorisation moves from a token plus SHA-256 hash to an OAuth2 token, responses are JSON only outside product feeds, the quota becomes "20 requests per minute per user" with no monthly cap, dates move from mm/dd/yyyy to yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ss, and the transaction list API accepts date ranges of up to 31 days.¹²

The one that changes your logic rather than your plumbing is the status model. ShareASale's transaction status was Approved or Declined; on Awin a transaction is Pending first and then approved or declined "via same endpoint", with approvals and amendments both handled there.¹² A script that assumed a transaction was already in a final state has nothing to do until it learns to look at pending rows.

APIs are on the Accelerate and Advanced plans as standard; an Awin Access account may use them if an account user is listed on more than one Awin programme.¹² On Access without that, the batch CSV is the bulk path.

A first validation run on Awin

Do one run end to end before you trust the new deadline.

1. Look up your auto-validation period in your programme settings, and write down the date the oldest pending transaction expires.
2. Export pending transactions: Awin Classic, Reports → Performance → Transactions, filtered to Pending. On the new Awin platform it is Commissions → Review commission payments → Review pending → Export.¹³
3. Export your Shopify orders for the same window, starting about a week earlier.
4. Match on the order reference — the column Awin calls Order reference or EXTRA — and separate full refunds and cancellations from partial refunds.
5. Decline the first group, amend the second, and write a reason that names the order, the date and the amount.
6. Upload, then read the Batch Process History results file rather than assuming.

If you are doing this inside AffCheck, importing your Awin transactions covers the export and what the app reads from it, and Awin commission validation for Shopify is the reference page for the programme settings, plans and fees that sit behind all of this.