ShareASale Integration Guide: Why “ShareASale API” Now Means Awin

If you searched for a shareasale integration guide expecting to find tokens and header schemes, the most useful thing this article can tell you is that you’re building against the wrong target. ShareASale is now Awin, the standalone ShareASale platform closed as an independent network in October 2025, and every merchant relationship that used to live there now lives inside Awin. This guide exists to correct the outdated content still circulating, walk through exactly how to audit and connect ShareASale to cashback website infrastructure that was originally built years ago, and point you toward the API that actually works today.

Is ShareASale Still a Separate Network? #

No. ShareASale is now Awin in every practical sense. Awin, which acquired ShareASale in 2017, finished migrating every active account by mid-August 2025, and the standalone ShareASale platform closed October 6, 2025. shareasale.com now redirects to Awin, and a shareasale integration built today is really an Awin integration wearing an old name.

READ THIS BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE ShareASale no longer exists as an independent platform. Awin, which acquired ShareASale in 2017, completed migrating every active ShareASale advertiser and publisher account onto the Awin platform in mid-August 2025, and the standalone ShareASale platform officially closed on October 6, 2025. shareasale.com now redirects to Awin. If you’re planning a new integration today, you are integrating with Awin, using former ShareASale merchant relationships that now live inside an Awin publisher account, not with a separate ShareASale API.

shareasale.com itself is the simplest proof of this: the domain now redirects straight to awin.com. For the full picture of how a live Awin integration works, not just the migration side, our general guide to affiliate network integration covers the same ground from the other direction.

What Does the ShareASale to Awin Migration Actually Mean? #

The ShareASale to Awin migration ran quietly in the background for most publishers. Awin describes it as an upgrade rather than a migration requiring manual work, and for the vast majority of accounts that held true. Publishers log into the same Awin publisher platform that every other Awin account uses. But “nothing to do” at the account level is different from “nothing changes” at the integration level, and that gap is where most of the confusion comes from.

• If you had an active ShareASale publisher account, nothing was lost in the ShareASale to Awin migration: your advertiser relationships, tracking links, and commission history moved automatically to Awin, and you log in with your existing credentials.
• The former ShareASale API, with its distinctive x-ShareASale-Date / x-ShareASale-Authentication header scheme, no longer has anything to connect to. shareasale.com traffic redirects to Awin.
• Any new engineering work should be built against the standard Awin Publisher API (OAuth2 Bearer authentication), not the legacy ShareASale scheme.
• ShareASale merchants that migrated are now reachable through the same Awin credentials, Awin datafeed system, and Awin deeplink structure. Our guide to understanding cashback tracking and notification delays is worth reading alongside this, since migrated merchants can behave differently during the first sync cycle.

How Did the Legacy ShareASale API Work? #

If you’re auditing an old integration or reading legacy documentation, here’s how it worked before the shutdown, so you can recognize what needs to be replaced. The core of it was your shareasale affiliate id token secret key set, used to build a signed request header rather than a modern bearer token:

• Authentication was a SHA-256 HMAC-style hash built from the string APIToken:CurrentDateInUTCFormat:APIAction:APISecret, sent as the x-ShareASale-Date and x-ShareASale-Authentication HTTP headers.
• Your shareasale affiliate id token secret key, an Affiliate ID, API Token, and Secret Key, were issued under Tools → API Reporting in the old dashboard.
• Requests required IP allow-listing, and the API enforced a monthly request quota that varied by account (some third-party tools reported limits as low as 200–2,000 requests per month).
• ShareASale’s SubID equivalent was a parameter called afftrack.

None of this is operable today. It’s documented here only so a migration audit has something concrete to check against.

If you’re setting up a fresh Awin account rather than migrating an old one, our guide to affiliate network approval covers what publisher approval looks like from a standing start.

How Do You Audit a Legacy ShareASale Integration? #

Before you can connect ShareASale to cashback website infrastructure the right way, you need a clear picture of how deeply the old integration is embedded. Walk through this checklist against your own codebase:

• Search your codebase for the literal string x-ShareASale-Authentication, every place it appears is a call that needs to be rebuilt against Awin’s OAuth2 flow instead.
• Find where your shareasale affiliate id token secret key is stored (environment variables, a secrets manager, a config table) and confirm it isn’t referenced anywhere your deployment pipeline still checks at startup. A hard failure on a dead credential can take down an unrelated deploy.
• Check for any code that constructs an afftrack parameter, and plan its replacement with Awin’s clickRef equivalent.
• Confirm whether your former ShareASale merchants have actually appeared in your Awin account yet, migration timing varied, and a merchant absent from Awin may need to be manually rejoined rather than assumed lost. Our roundup of global affiliate networks for cashback websites is a useful reference if you end up evaluating whether to rejoin through Awin directly or add a different network instead.

MIGRATING OFF LEGACY SHAREASALE?Our ShareASale integration services cover exactly this: auditing what’s left of your old token-and-secret-key setup and rebuilding it cleanly against Awin. We’ve handled this migration before.→  Talk to our integration team

What Should You Test After Migrating to Awin? #

ShareASale is now Awin for every practical purpose, so treat this as a verification pass, not a fresh integration. Once you’ve rebuilt the integration, don’t assume parity with the old setup just because the dashboard shows familiar merchant names:

• Generate a fresh deep link for a formerly-ShareASale merchant through Awin and confirm it resolves to the correct destination, not a generic homepage fallback.
• Run a small test transaction and confirm it appears in Awin’s transaction API with the correct clickRef, not orphaned the way an afftrack-based click would have been under the old scheme.
• Diff your historical ShareASale commission reports against what Awin now reports for the same merchants, to confirm no gap opened during the transition window.
• Remember: ShareASale is now Awin at every layer, including support. Direct any unresolved questions to Awin’s team rather than the old ShareASale contact. Our guide to affiliate commission tracking covers what a clean reconciliation looks like once the migration is behind you.

FAQ #

Conclusion #

The most useful thing you can do with a shareasale integration in 2026 is stop building one. The platform is gone, the merchants are on Awin, and every hour spent maintaining the old header-hash authentication scheme is an hour not spent on something that still works. If you have former ShareASale merchants inside an Awin account and want that properly connected to your platform, talk to our integration team. Our ShareASale integration services handle this exact migration, whether those merchants originated on ShareASale or Awin itself.