Affiliate networks and software for merchants: fees compared

Picking an affiliate network for merchants comes down to one trade. A network hands you a crowd of affiliates and takes a cut of each sale. In-house software costs less, but you'll find every affiliate yourself.

That's the whole trade.

This roundup is for the business paying the commissions. If you haven't set up the program yet, begin with our hub on launching an affiliate program. Still choosing a rate? Our breakdown of how much to pay affiliates covers that.

Here, we only compare where the program runs and what that costs.

How we compared 10 pricing pages in one day

So we did the plain, slow thing. On October 27, 2026, we opened the public pricing or sign-up page of every platform below, signed out, from one browser.

We wrote down what each page printed: the monthly fee, any cut of sales, the contract and the catch. Some pages made that easy, with a plan grid and a FAQ underneath. Others hid the real terms in small print, such as an intro price that doubles at renewal or a contract named only in a FAQ answer. Then we took one made-up store and worked out its monthly bill on each platform, with every number shown below.

Two networks printed no price at all. None.

And one old favorite, ShareASale, no longer has its own sign-up page.

Prices change often. Treat every figure here as "as of October 2026", and recheck the linked page before you sign, because vendors rename plans and move features often.

We don't sell any of these tools, and none of them paid to be listed.

Affiliate network fees side by side, as of October 2026

That reading gave us one table. It lists each platform's entry plan, plus a second plan where the jump matters.

Sources for each row are linked in the sections that follow. The prices come from Awin, impact.com, the Shopify App Store, AffiliateWP, Refersion and Tapfiliate, all read October 27, 2026.

Commissions come on top. Always.

Awin is now where ShareASale merchants start

The table's first rows belong to Awin, and that's also where ShareASale went. Typing shareasale.com now lands you on an Awin page headed "ShareASale is now part of Awin". Further down, Awin explains it: "Instead of signing up to ShareASale, new customers are invited to launch directly with Awin" (Awin, October 2026).

So if an old list told you to join ShareASale, you'll be comparing Awin plans instead.

Awin's entry plan, Access, is built for small brands. Awin’s US pricing page says the "First month completely free" and lists a "Low-risk 3-month minimum term". Accelerate adds automation and richer reports. Advanced has "Custom pricing".

It suits a store that wants affiliates to find it, not the other way round.

The catch is the percentage. Awin's tracking fee is charged on every sale an affiliate sends, in addition to the commission you pay. A quiet month costs little, and a great month costs a lot.

If your store already has fans who post about it, a network's 3.5% may buy you little that a free app and a few emails couldn't.

impact.com is cheap to try and costly to commit to

Like Awin, impact.com charges a monthly fee plus a cut. But only on its smallest plan. Starter costs $30 a month plus 2.5% of revenue as of October 2026, and it's "Available only for" stores on Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and six other platforms.

One thing Starter lacks is the Partner Marketplace. Its plan list shows "Partner recommendations" instead, and the marketplace first appears under Essentials. Small gap? No. For a store that needs affiliates to find it, that marketplace is the main draw.

The next tier is a different deal. The same pricing page lists Essentials at $500 a month as of October 2026, which "Includes up to $2,500/mo in partner payouts". It's meant for brands with up to $2 million a year in ecommerce revenue. Pro jumps to $2,500 a month.

That jump from $30 to $500 is where a small store should stop and ask whether it needs the marketplace and extra reporting, or just a bigger plan.

Then there's the contract.

It's the part to read twice.

The pricing FAQ asks, "Why do you require a 12-month contract?" and explains it. Starter has a 30-day free trial. For Essentials and above, the page recommends a demo with sales first.

Best for: a Shopify or WooCommerce store testing affiliates it recruits itself on Starter, or a brand with steady affiliate sales that can plan a year ahead.

The catch: a year is long when you're still finding out whether affiliates work for you at all.

CJ and Rakuten Advertising don't publish prices

These two well-known networks don't print prices. We looked.

CJ’s home page sends advertisers to a "Get Started" form, and cj.com/pricing returned a "page not found" error for us. Rakuten Advertising’s advertiser page has a "Let's talk" button and a contact form, with no plan list.

Fair enough. That doesn't make them bad. It suggests who they're built for: brands ready to talk to sales before they see a price. A shop with a few thousand dollars of affiliate sales a month is better served lower in this list.

Who it suits: established brands that want the network to help run the program.

The catch: you can't compare their cost until you've talked to sales.

On Shopify, an app can cost almost nothing

That's the big end of the market. At the small end, a Shopify store can start an in-house program without a network at all.

Shopify Collabs, Shopify's own app, is "Free to install". Its listing adds that a "2.9% commission processing fee on automatic payments may apply". Commissions are paid "automatically via your Shopify bill", so there's no separate payout account to manage.

No sales call. No contract.

GOAFFPRO has a free plan with "Unlimited Affiliates" and "Unlimited Revenue". Its Premium plan costs $49 a month as of October 2026, puts the affiliate portal on a domain you own, and comes with a 15-day free trial.

Good fit: a new Shopify store. It recruits its own customers and creators.

The catch is that neither app hands you a network's crowd of affiliates. Still deciding on a platform for the store itself? Our side-by-side of WordPress and Shopify costs lays out the yearly bill for each.

AffiliateWP suits WooCommerce stores, at the renewal price

WordPress stores have their own in-house route, and the best-known plugin is AffiliateWP. It's a yearly license with "Zero Platform Fees", so it takes no cut of your sales.

Read the price carefully. AffiliateWP’s pricing page showed the Personal plan, for one site, "normally $299.00" and on sale for $149.50 a year in October 2026. The small print says "all renewals are at full price".

Budget for $299 a year, then. Not $149.50.

There's also a 14-day refund window. Handy. Best for: a WooCommerce store with someone who's happy running plugins. If your store isn't built yet, our step-by-step guide to building an ecommerce website covers the platform choice first.

The catch: you host it, update it and fix it when a WordPress or WooCommerce update breaks something, which is the price of owning the software instead of renting it.

Refersion and Tapfiliate work with any store, within limits

Not on Shopify or WordPress, or running more than one store? Stand-alone tools plug into most carts and charge the same way wherever you sell.

Refersion prices its Launch plan at $39 a month, or $29 billed yearly, "+3% of affiliate-driven sales", as of October 2026. Growth is $199, or $159 yearly, plus 2%. Launch already includes "Unlimited affiliates" and one-click payouts, PayPal included. Our PayPal fee calculator shows what each payout costs you to send.

Tapfiliate has no cut of sales. Its Launch plan costs $89 a month, or $74 billed yearly, as of October 2026. But it caps you at 50 affiliates and 500 conversions a month, then charges $15 per extra 1,000 conversions.

A program with 200 coupon-site affiliates would blow past the 50-affiliate cap on day one, while a program with ten bloggers would never notice it at all.

Best for: stores on less common platforms, or software companies. If you sell subscriptions, see how SaaS affiliate programs pay partners before choosing. Recurring commissions change what you need from the tool.

The catch: Refersion's 3% grows with every sale, and Tapfiliate's caps arrive fast if you sign up lots of small affiliates.

Example: what one pickle shop would pay each month

Those fee shapes only make sense with real numbers, so here's one store worked through.

Example: Burlap and Brine Pickle Co. is a made-up Shopify store in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Say it expects $6,000 a month in affiliate-driven sales in late 2026 and pays affiliates 15%, or $900. Here's its platform bill on each option, before that $900, using the October 2026 prices above.

The cheapest option is about a twentieth of the dearest. Big gap.

But the cheap ones don't bring affiliates, so the shop pays in recruiting time instead, and that time costs money even without an invoice.

Now the part most roundups skip. It matters. Percent fees look cheap at launch, then overtake flat fees as sales grow. Awin Access costs more than Tapfiliate's $89 once affiliate sales pass about $1,143 a month.

Refersion Launch crosses Tapfiliate at about $1,667. impact.com's Essentials plan is harder to compare. Its $500 covers up to $2,500 a month in partner payouts, and above that, impact.com bills "a la carte" at a price it doesn't publish. At the shop's 15% rate, payouts reach $2,500 at about $16,667 in sales. Up to there, Starter wins, because even at $16,667 in sales it costs about $447 a month, still $53 under the Essentials fee. Past that point, we can't give you an honest break-even, because impact.com doesn't publish what Essentials costs once payouts top its allowance. So we won't guess.

If these numbers are hard to pin down for your own store, our team can price the set-up with you through our quote form. We sell that service, so you know where our interest lies.

Which affiliate network should a small store pick?

After all that math, the choice mostly depends on one question: who'll find your affiliates? If you'll recruit them yourself, start in-house. If you need strangers to discover you, pay for a network or a platform with a partner marketplace.

• No affiliates yet, and a Shopify store: try Shopify Collabs or GOAFFPRO's free plan first.
• A WooCommerce store: AffiliateWP, budgeted at its $299 renewal price.
• Any other cart, or more than one store: Refersion or Tapfiliate, depending on how many affiliates you expect.
• You need affiliates to find you: Awin Access, or impact.com Essentials, the first tier that lists its Partner Marketplace.
• Steady affiliate sales and a team to run them: impact.com Essentials, CJ or Rakuten Advertising, after a sales call.

Our take: start in-house unless you truly can't recruit affiliates yourself. You can move to a network later, and you won't have paid a cut on sales your own customers sent.

Whatever you choose, the legal duty doesn't move to the platform. The FTC's rule at 16 CFR 255.1(d) is blunt. "An advertiser may be liable for a deceptive endorsement even when the endorser is not liable." We aren't lawyers, so ask an attorney how that applies to your program.

Share our walkthrough on using affiliate links with new partners, since it covers their side.

And track every partner yourself. Tag each affiliate's link in our UTM builder. Then check the platform's numbers against GA4, using our GA4 setup guide.

Know which platform fits and want help connecting it to your store? Request a set-up quote, and we'll price the work line by line.

How we made this guide: Eram N.'s rewrite was checked line by line against the vendors' own pages, which we opened signed out on October 27, 2026. We recorded each plan's fee, cut of sales and contract terms, then worked out the pickle shop's monthly bill in a short script and by hand. The shop is made up. We weren't paid by any platform listed, and each source sits next to the claim it supports.

First published August 2020. Rewritten October 27, 2026: turned a list of affiliate programs for bloggers into a merchant's comparison of affiliate networks and software. It adds dated fees, contract terms, the ShareASale and Rakuten changes, and a worked monthly cost.

Sources

• Awin: Advertiser plans, US (vendor pricing, read October 27, 2026)
• Awin: ShareASale is now part of Awin (vendor page, read October 27, 2026)
• impact.com: Pricing and pricing FAQ (vendor pricing, read October 27, 2026)
• impact.com: Rakuten and impact.com Announce Alliance, April 28, 2026
• Rakuten Advertising: Advertisers (vendor page, read October 27, 2026)
• CJ: Home page (vendor page, read October 27, 2026)
• Shopify App Store: Shopify Collabs (read October 27, 2026)
• Shopify App Store: GOAFFPRO (read October 27, 2026)
• AffiliateWP: Pricing (vendor pricing, read October 27, 2026)
• Refersion: Pricing (vendor pricing, read October 27, 2026)
• Tapfiliate: Pricing (vendor pricing, read October 27, 2026)
• eCFR: 16 CFR 255.1, General considerations (FTC Endorsement Guides)