What happens if the store simply never responds?

Then the sale is approved automatically when the approval period is over – after 30 days, unless the store has chosen 45, 60 or 90. A daily background job approves the conversions that have been pending for the whole deadline. No affiliate is left hanging in pending because a store did not get round to looking.

Are all sales approved automatically when the period is over?

No, two kinds are excluded. If an affiliate buys through their own link – the same email for buyer and affiliate, measured in Stripe and the WooCommerce plugin – the sale is rejected automatically as self-referral, visibly with a reason and with no commission or fee. Sales that look like fraud without it being proven, for example a click shortly after the affiliate account was created, are flagged for review at the store and are never approved automatically; the store or Affilyflow decides them.

Can an approved sale be withdrawn afterwards?

Not by the store. An approval is final, and a sale whose approval period is over cannot be rejected at all. If an order is refunded or cancelled via the WooCommerce plugin, or a Stripe payment is refunded or disputed, the commission is nevertheless rejected automatically – even when the sale is approved. A partial refund reduces the commission proportionally. If the sale was approved more than 90 days ago and the commission has been paid out, the affiliate keeps it – Affilyflow bears the difference. If there is a genuine dispute, Affilyflow as the network can reopen a settled conversion, and that action is in the audit log.

Can the store change the approval period?

Yes, between 30, 45, 60 and 90 days – typically according to the return period, so commission is never paid out for an item that is sent back. The change only applies to new sales: the period is locked on the sale when it is recorded, and affiliates who have joined are notified.

Does a rejection cost the store anything?

No. Rejected conversions are included in neither commission owed, network fee nor revenue. But the rejection costs reputation: the approval rate is visible to affiliates before they join.

For stores and affiliates

The deadline that makes the network fair.

An affiliate works in advance for a store they have never met. The whole question is what happens to the sale afterwards – and who decides how long it may take.

Create an affiliate account Create a store account

30–90 days: to reject a sale – set per program according to the return period
1 reason: is mandatory on every single rejection
10 sales: and your approval rate is public to affiliates

The process

Three steps, and only one of them requires anyone to do something.

A conversion never credits a balance automatically. Everything is created as pending – that applies to sales from Shopify, WooCommerce, Stripe and your own website without exception.

The SLA clock · 30 days

Illustration

Choose what the store does. The clock shows the rest.

Day

of 30

Pending

The sale

#10482 · DKK 1,248 · commission DKK 124.80

The sale is pending.

No conversion credits a balance automatically. Commission and fee are reserved on the store’s balance, but the amount is not the affiliate’s yet.

Whichever way the process goes, it ends in the same place: a date both parties can count on. The numbers in the example are made up.

The sale is created as pendingNo conversion credits a balance automatically. Commission and network fee are reserved on the store’s prepaid balance, but the amount is not the affiliate’s yet.
The store has the approval periodThe period – 30, 45, 60 or 90 days – is shown on the program before the affiliate joins, and is locked on the sale, so a later change never moves it. The sale details show the order ID, order lines, order value, commission, fee, traffic source, click time, subscription plan and any discount code. Enough basis to check instead of rejecting blindly.
Either a decision – or the deadlineIf the store approves, it is final and cannot be undone. If it rejects, a reason must come with it. If nothing happens, the sale is approved automatically by the system when the period is over.

The deadline is the mechanism itself. Without it, “pending” would be a place where money could be parked indefinitely, and a commission delay with no end date is in reality a withholding. The deadline works both ways: the store sets it according to its return period and gets peace to wait for returns, and the affiliate gets a date to count on – it is shown on every sale.

Rejection

A rejection requires a reason.

The store chooses between returned, duplicate order, test order, fraud or other. There is no button that just says no.

The reason is passed on to the affiliate together with the decision, both as a notification in the dashboard and – if they have asked for it – as an email. They can therefore check the rejection against the sale’s own details: order number, order lines, discount code, source, which of their pages created the click, and when the click happened. Disagreement is still possible, but it becomes concrete instead of being about feelings.

The symmetry

Approval is final – rejection has a deadline

The two rules belong together. An approval cannot be undone, and a sale whose approval period is over cannot be rejected. That is what makes approved earnings something you dare to count on when you plan your month.

Reputation

The approval rate is visible to both parties.

A store that rejects a lot costs affiliates their working time. That is why the rejection share is not the store’s private number: it is shown on the program, and it works both ways – it warns the affiliate and disciplines the store.

That is why the number is on the program. Once the store has decided at least 10 sales, affiliates can see what share it approves before they join. The store’s own dashboard shows the number after just 5 decided sales – with a warning if it falls below 75%, while there is still time to do something about it.

Why it works

Market discipline rather than rules

We do not need to forbid a store from rejecting. We just need to show how much it rejects. A store with a low rate loses affiliates to a store with a high one – and that is faster and fairer enforcement than any support case can deliver. That is why the threshold of 10 decided sales is not a technical detail: without it, a single rejected test order could condemn a store that has done nothing wrong.

Before the deadline

Most of the junk never reaches the decision.

The fewer sales the store has to reject manually, the better for both parties. A large part of the clean-up happens before anyone sees the conversion.

The same order can never count twice on the same program – deduplication happens on order ID and invoice number. Known crawlers and previews get neither click recording nor attribution, so the store’s conversion rate is not ruined by robot traffic. Unfilled template values such as YOUR_ORDER_ID are not accepted as an order number. And a blocked affiliate cannot earn, whichever route the sale comes in by – it is enforced by a trigger in the database, not by a form.

Refunds

Automatic on WooCommerce and Stripe

If an order is refunded or cancelled via the WooCommerce plugin, or a Stripe payment is refunded or disputed, the commission is rejected automatically, and the affiliate is notified. If only part of the order is refunded, the commission and fee are reduced proportionally. On Shopify and on script-based sales, the store has to reject within the deadline itself. We would rather say it straight than have someone discover it three months in. How a reversed commission is handled in the balance is explained under payments and balance.

Disputes

If you disagree, the network can decide it.

A network is not just a payment link. It is the third party that can decide a case where the other two each have their own interest.

Affilyflow can approve, reject or reopen a conversion, and we are not bound by the store’s deadline. The basis is not a claim from either of you: every single tracking event is logged with source, amount, VAT, discount and result – including the events that never became a sale. We can therefore answer why a sale did not land, instead of guessing.

Control

All privileged actions are audit-logged

Approvals, rejections, reopenings, status changes and payouts are written to the audit log with who, what and when. No change to other people’s money happens untracked – not even our own.

Terms on this page

The full affiliate glossary explains the rest.

Questions

What people actually ask.

What happens if the store simply never responds?: Then the sale is approved automatically when the approval period is over – after 30 days, unless the store has chosen 45, 60 or 90. A daily background job takes the conversions that have been pending for the whole deadline. Nobody is left hanging in “pending” because a store did not get round to looking.
Are all sales approved automatically when the period is over?: No, two kinds are excluded. If an affiliate buys through their own link – the same email for buyer and affiliate, measured in Stripe and the WooCommerce plugin – the sale is rejected automatically as self-referral, visibly with a reason and with no commission or fee. Sales that look like fraud without it being proven, for example a click shortly after the affiliate account was created, are flagged for review at the store and are never approved automatically; the store or Affilyflow decides them.
Can an approved sale be withdrawn afterwards?: Not by the store. An approval is final, and a sale whose approval period is over cannot be rejected at all. If an order is refunded or cancelled via the WooCommerce plugin, or a Stripe payment is refunded or disputed, the commission is nevertheless rejected automatically – even when the sale is approved. A partial refund reduces the commission proportionally. If the sale was approved more than 90 days ago and the commission has been paid out, the affiliate keeps it – we bear the difference. If there is a genuine dispute, we as the network can reopen a settled conversion – and that action is in the audit log.
Can the store change the approval period?: Yes, between 30, 45, 60 and 90 days – typically according to the return period, so commission is never paid out for an item that is sent back. The change only applies to new sales: the period is locked on the sale when it is recorded, and affiliates who have joined are notified.
Does a rejection cost the store anything?: No. Rejected conversions are included in neither commission owed, network fee nor revenue. But they cost reputation: the approval rate is visible to affiliates before they join – see the program catalogue.

Read on

Where to next

Documentation and further reading

Next step

A date to count on, at both ends of the table.

The store decides for itself what it approves. The affiliate knows when they will have an answer. That is the agreement the rest of the platform rests on – the rest of the terms are under program terms.

Create an affiliate account Create a store account