Export your Shopify orders

AffCheck needs one file from Shopify: the orders export. It is the side of the match that says which orders were refunded, cancelled, discounted or never placed at all. You export it from Shopify admin; AffCheck reads it in this browser.

The steps

1. In Shopify admin, open Orders and filter to the dates you want to check, starting a few days before the oldest network transaction.
2. Click Export and choose which orders to export — all orders, or the ones in your date range.
3. Under Export as, pick a CSV file (Plain CSV file or CSV for Excel), then click Export orders.¹
4. Drop the file on the Shopify orders zone on the Imports screen.

Which dates to pick

Match the range to your network export, then widen it backwards. A transaction dated 2 January belongs to an order placed on or before 2 January, so an orders export that starts on 1 January will miss it.

A useful habit: export orders for the whole validation period plus a week. On a 30-day period that is about five weeks of orders — small enough to export quickly, wide enough that nothing lands in "not found".

The Imports screen shows what your stored orders cover and warns when pending transactions fall outside that window, so you do not have to work the dates out by hand.

Which columns are read

The parser reads sixteen columns and skips the rest, cell by cell:

Seven of those are required — Name, Created at, Currency, Total, Refunded Amount, Cancelled at and Financial Status. Without them the check either cannot run or would silently miss refunds, so a missing one is reported rather than assumed.

Customer details never leave your browser

The Shopify export contains customer data: Email, Phone, every Billing … and Shipping … column, Notes, Note Attributes, payment references and ids. None of it is read by the engine, and none of it has anywhere to go: the payload the Imports screen sends has no field for a name, an email, an address or a payment reference, and the server refuses a batch that carries one.

The file itself is never uploaded, and its name is not stored either. What is saved is one row per order: the order name, the dates, the totals, the refunded amount, the discount codes, the tags and the number of line items.

If the file arrives by email

Shopify sends larger exports, and exports filtered by date, to you and the store owner by email rather than downloading them in the browser.¹ That is normal. Download the file from the email and drop it on the Imports screen as usual — nothing about the check changes.

Re-uploading and coverage

Upload the orders export as often as you like. Orders are stored by order name, so a second upload updates the orders it already knows and adds the new ones; nothing is duplicated.

Refunds work the same way, with one wrinkle worth knowing: the CSV gives a cumulative refunded total and no refund ids, so AffCheck keeps one refund snapshot per order and the newest export wins. An export showing that a refund was reversed removes the snapshot. That is why the evidence on a flag names the date of the Shopify export it read — it tells you which file the number came from.

When your orders are older than the transactions you are checking, re-upload a fresher export before reading the review queue. Rows matched against stale orders are the usual reason a refund shows up a week late.