Join Awin with your FreshStore store

Awin is a large affiliate network with thousands of shops. It is strongest in the UK and Europe and also has many US shops. It suits stores whose products are sold by specialist shops, such as tools, lighting, garden, golf, music gear or travel. You open one Awin account, and then each shop (Awin calls them advertisers) decides whether to accept you.

What you need before you apply

• A live store with real content. Products on the homepage and a few helpful articles. Reviewers open your store, and an empty or unfinished store is often refused.
• A real email address that you check. Approvals and questions arrive there.
• Your store URL. Use your custom domain if you have one, because that is the address the reviewer checks.
• A short description of your store: what it covers and who it helps. Two or three sentences are enough.
• Your real name, address and payment details. Awin checks them and pays commission to that account.
• A debit or credit card for a small deposit. Awin uses it to check who you are and pays it back with your first commission payment.

Step-by-step: open your Awin account

1. Go to https://ui.awin.com/publisher-signup.
2. Choose your primary region (the country most of your visitors come from) and your primary promotional type. Choose the type for a content or review website.
3. Fill in your user details and your company or personal details.
4. In the Promotional Space section, fill in Promotional Space URL (your store URL), Description (what your store covers and who it helps) and Sectors (the sectors your products belong to). Click Next.
5. Fill in your financial details and pay the deposit. Awin's own pages give amounts between 1 and 5 in GBP, EUR or USD. The form shows the amount for your region.
6. In the Joining the network section, tick the box to accept the terms and conditions, then click Join Our Network.

How long approval takes

Awin aims to review new accounts within 24 hours on working days. Weekends, bank holidays and incomplete forms take longer.

If Awin refuses you, it does not return the deposit by itself. Contact Awin support and ask for it back, using the topic Network Signup. Before you apply again, fix the likely reason: add articles and products, write a clear description, and check that your store URL opens.

Join the shops you want to promote

An Awin account on its own earns nothing. You apply to each shop separately.

1. In Awin, go to Advertisers > Join Programmes.
2. Use the filters (region, sector) to find shops that sell what your store covers.
3. Click + Join, or open the shop's profile and click Join Programme.
4. Choose your promotional type, add a short introduction about your store, accept the programme terms and click Join.

The status stays Pending until the shop reviews you. Some shops accept within a day; others take a week or more.

Get a link to a product

1. In Awin, go to Toolbox > Link Builder (in some accounts the menu is called Tools).
2. Choose the shop (advertiser).
3. Paste the address of the product page on the shop's website as the destination.
4. Copy the link from the box labelled Your Deep Link.

The link starts with https://www.awin1.com/cread.php. Do not click Shorten Link: your store needs the full awin1.com link to add its tracking sub id.

Add the link to your store as a custom offer

A Awin link goes into your store as a custom offer. The offer puts a buy button with your link on the product page. All the steps below are in your store admin at https://your-store-domain/admin.

For a new product

1. Go to Store > Products > Products and click New.
2. Fill in the product title, content and images.
3. In the Where to Buy (Custom Offer) section, paste your Awin link into Affiliate Link / URL.
4. Choose the Locale, add the price in Price (optional), and save.
5. Go to Store > Products > Offers and open the new offer to set the shop name and price note (see the fields below).

For a product you already have

Open the product, scroll to the Offers panel and click New. The Create a Custom Offer form opens. When you save, the offer is linked to that product.

The fields that matter for a Awin link

• Affiliate Link: your Awin link, exactly as Awin gave it to you.
• Shop Name: the name shown on the buy button, for example "Tooled Up". A tracking link from a network shows no shop name unless you fill this in.
• Price: the price on the shop's page today. Add Full Price only when the shop shows a discount.
• Price note: a few words beside the price, for example "from". "from" goes before the price ("from £89"). Anything else goes after it ("£89 per night"). Leave it blank for a plain price.
• Locale (under Settings on the right): choose All Locales if the shop delivers to most of your visitors. If the shop sells to one country only, choose that country. When all of a product's offers are custom offers for another country, visitors still see the buy button, with a line such as "Ships to the United Kingdom only" under it.

For every option on a custom offer, see the Custom Offers feature guide.

The tracking sub id: which store sent the click

Your store adds a tracking sub id to every Awin link by itself. You do not need to change the link. Awin calls this value Click Ref (clickref in the link). It shows in your Awin reports, so you can see which store sent each click and sale when one account serves several stores.

The default is your store's domain with a hyphen for each dot. For example, mystore.com becomes mystore-com.

To use your own value, go to Store > Settings > Offers, find the Custom Offers section and fill in Tracking sub id. Use letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores, up to 50 characters. Leave it blank to keep the default.

If your link already has its own clickref value, your store leaves it as it is.

More detail is in the Offer Settings feature guide.

See your clicks

Go to Sales > Affiliate Clicks in your store admin. The Destination column shows the domain of the link each visitor clicked. For Awin links this is awin1.com. Use the Destination filter to show only those clicks.

The domain is the network's, so all your Awin shops share it. To see the clicks for one shop, go to Store > Products > Offers, open the offer, and scroll to Affiliate Clicks. Your Awin reports show the same clicks, split by the tracking sub id. See the Affiliate Clicks feature guide.

Common problems

• My clicks show in Awin but no sales. Check that the shop shows you as joined, not pending. Check that the link came from Link Builder for that same shop.
• A shop refused me. Each shop judges fit. Apply to shops that match your niche closely, and write articles about their kind of products first.
• My Awin report shows no Click Ref. The link is probably a short tidd.ly link. Make it again in Link Builder and use the full awin1.com link.
• The buy button shows no shop name. Open the offer and fill in Shop Name.
• The price on my store is out of date. A custom offer keeps the price you typed. Turn on Keep Custom Prices Fresh under Store > Settings > Offers and your store reads the price from the shop page about once a day. Pages it cannot read keep the price you entered, so check those now and then.
• I have more than one store. One Awin account is enough. Add each store to your Awin profile as another promotional space before you use links on it. The tracking sub id keeps their reports apart.