Awin

Awin charges you a percentage of the order, not the commission. A $100 sale with a 6% commission pays your publisher $6 and pays Awin $3.50. More than half of what the affiliate earned goes to the network, and that's on the cheapest plan.

That's the number to carry through this review, because everything else about Awin is reasonable and that number isn't. It's also the network that swallowed ShareASale in 2025, so if you're searching for ShareASale pricing in 2026, this is the page you actually want.

I have an active Awin account as an affiliate, so the affiliate-side observations below are mine. I haven't run a brand program on it. The brand-side detail is from Awin's pricing page, feature comparison, help centre and API docs, plus the Shopify app reviews.

Who it's for

Retail and DTC brands selling physical goods, especially outside the US or across several countries, whose category runs on deal sites, voucher publishers and comparison engines. Awin is European by origin (Berlin, owned by Axel Springer) and the ShareASale merge gave it the North American mid-market base to match. If your publishers are the kind who run "Brand X discount code" pages, this is where they live.

Also: anyone who got migrated from ShareASale and is deciding whether to stay. Short version: the publishers came with you, the history didn't, and the fee model changed.

Who should skip it

SaaS and digital products. The percentage-of-order-value fee is built for physical goods with retail margins; on a $500 a year software subscription it's punitive, and the integrations are carts (Shopify, WooCommerce, Adobe Commerce), not billing platforms.

Anyone who needs to own their publisher relationships. Awin won't give you their email addresses. I'll come back to this because it's the lock-in.

Anyone under about $20,000 a month in affiliate sales. The 3.5% on order value at that size is $700 on top of $49, and a Shopify app does the job for a fraction of that.

Pricing, decoded

Awin publishes prices, which puts it ahead of CJ and Rakuten.

• Access: $49/month plus 3.5% of transaction value. First month free, then a three-month minimum. 14 days' written notice to leave. Up to three commission rule types. No partner payment processing; you pay publishers through Awin's invoicing but there's no managed rail.
• Accelerate: from $99/month plus 2.5%. Ten rule types, APIs, a branded private network, payment processing.
• Advanced: custom. Twelve rule types.

Non-transaction verticals (finance, telecom) are on "alternative rates," not published. Setup fees and deposits aren't on the US pricing page; the ShareASale era had a $625 access fee and a $125 deposit, so ask whether anything survived.

Now the worked numbers. The percentage is on transaction value, so your commission rate doesn't change what Awin takes.

• $10,000 a month in affiliate sales on Access: $49 plus $350, so $399.
• $50,000 a month on Access: $49 plus $1,750, so $1,799. On Accelerate: $99 plus $1,250, so $1,349.
• impact.com Starter at the same $50,000: $30 plus $1,250, so $1,280, with a twelve-month contract instead of three.

Awin's percentage falls as you go up a tier, but Accelerate's starting price is "from $99," which means it can be more than $99. Get the actual number in writing.

What it does well

The publisher base for retail. Awin plus ShareASale is the largest pool of mid-market deal, voucher, cashback and comparison publishers you can reach from one dashboard, and in Europe it's the default network for a lot of categories. If those publishers are your channel, there's no cheaper way to reach them.

Public pricing and a short minimum. Three months and 14 days' notice is the friendliest term in the networks category. impact.com is twelve months. CJ is a private contract. You can try Awin and leave, which is rarer than it should be.

Tax handling. W-9 and W-8 collection with 1099-NEC filing through Tax1099. Payouts are managed through Awin's invoicing, with publishers paid via Payoneer or bank on their side.

From the affiliate side

Awin is closer to CJ than to impact.com. It works, but it doesn't get out of the way.

The geography is the thing. Awin is split by region, and a lot of brands run their US program and their UK or EU program as separate sign-ups. So the same product can mean two applications, two approvals, two sets of links and two places to check reporting. If you're an affiliate with an international audience, that's duplicated admin for every brand. If you're a brand selling in more than one region, it means you'll be running more than one program and your affiliates will know it.

The iPhone app is decent. It's limited, but it lets you stay connected to the account between desktop sessions, which is worth something when you're checking whether a campaign converted.

What I'd tell a brand from this: your affiliates on Awin are tolerating the platform, not enjoying it. They'll stay because the merchants are there. They won't stay because the tooling made them want to.

Lock-in: 3 out of 5

What gets you out: the three-month minimum and 14-day notice. Public pricing. Your Shopify or Woo integration is standard. Publishers are identified by ID, so your conversion history is at least matchable.

What keeps you in: the export. Awin's advertiser API returns publisher ID, name, region and promotion type. No email. No URL. Communication with publishers goes through Awin's own messaging centre. So every relationship you build on Awin is Awin's relationship, and if you leave, your publishers don't know where you went unless you found another way to reach them. Closing an account means an email with a specific subject line, clearing invoices, validating pending transactions, and fees that stop only when it's fully closed; unpaid invoices "may be passed to a third-party debt collection agency," in their words.

Three because the contract is easy and the data isn't. impact.com is the reverse.

Gotchas

• The fee is on order value, not commission. 3.5% of a $100 sale is $3.50 regardless of whether you paid the affiliate $3 or $15.
• No publisher emails in the export. The relationships live on Awin.
• Regional splits. Brands and affiliates both end up with one program per region. Budget the admin.
• "From $99" on Accelerate. The real price may be higher.
• Closure is a process, not a button. Specific email subject, invoices cleared, transactions validated, and a collections clause for anything unpaid.
• The Shopify app is rated 1.9 out of 5 on 33 reviews. Complaints include a six-month renewal that was hard to exit, cancellation emails going unanswered, commission charged on cancelled orders, and a feed that stopped and cost a brand about £1,000 in setup. Affiliates bidding on your brand name is another.
• ShareASale history didn't transfer. Historical reports, payment statements and publisher ratings from ShareASale are gone. If you were there, your track record restarted in 2025.
• The referral scheme is "currently inactive." There's no commission for referring a brand to Awin at the moment, which is why there's no affiliate link on this page.

Integrations

Shopify (the app with the 1.9 rating), WooCommerce, Adobe Commerce. Everything else via tracking tag and API on Accelerate and above.

Not supported: Stripe, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Chargebee, any course platform.

If you're leaving

Awin's export won't give you emails, so if you want your publishers to follow you, you need to have collected their contact details some other way while you were still there: through their sites, through the messaging centre, through the ones who reached out to you. Do that before you give notice. Then send the closure email with the subject line Awin specifies, clear every invoice, validate pending transactions, and keep the confirmation. Give the 14 days. Build the new program first so there's somewhere to send people.

Verdict

For a physical-goods brand whose channel is deal and voucher publishers, especially in Europe or across several countries, Awin is the practical choice, and the three-month minimum makes it the easiest network to try. The ShareASale merge means the North American mid-market publishers are there too.

The cost is the fee model, which takes a bigger bite of each sale than any other published network price, and the export, which keeps your publisher relationships on Awin's side of the fence. Go in knowing both. And if you're a brand on Shopify in the US doing enough volume to qualify, read the impact.com review before you sign, because at the same sales volume it's cheaper, the export includes emails, and from the affiliate side it's a better place to be paid.

Last verified November 1, 2026. Pricing from awin.com/pricing and the US feature comparison. Closure process from help.awin.com. Export fields from Awin's advertiser Publisher API documentation. ShareASale closure from Awin's own FAQ. Reviews referenced from the Shopify App Store, 2025 to 2026. Affiliate-side observations from the author's own Awin account.