How to review affiliate sales

Sales review keeps your affiliate program honest. Every order an affiliate drives starts as a claim — the gap between claim and payment is your chance to catch cancellations, returns, and fraud before money leaves your account.

Open Affiliate → Sales — that is where the review happens. Every affiliate-driven order is recorded, calculated, and held until you approve it. A sale links an order to the affiliate who drove it and stores the order, customer, total sale amount, commission Bloop calculated, and which campaign rules applied.

Sale statuses

Status	Meaning
Pending	Recorded and awaiting your review. Not yet payable.
Approved	Valid and confirmed. Counts toward the affiliate’s payable balance.
Rejected	Declined (e.g. cancelled order, fraud, returned). No commission owed.
Paid	Included in a completed payout.

A sale starts as pending, unless you’ve set order approval to Immediately in Automation settings, in which case it arrives approved. One exception: when the buyer’s email matches the affiliate’s own email, the sale always starts as pending with a self-referral note, so you decide whether to pay it. Approve it to make the commission payable, or reject it to dismiss it. Once included in a payout, it becomes paid. Nothing is payable until you approve it: pending is a holding pen, not an obligation.

The Sales tab filters by status — All, Paid, Approved, Pending, Rejected — with a live count on each, and searches by order name.

How commission is calculated

A commission is created when the order reaches the point you nominated in Order Settings: Paid by default, or Fulfilled. Cancelled orders, and orders whose payment is refunded, voided, expired or still pending, don’t create a sale (with the Fulfilled trigger, a pending payment doesn’t block it). Orders with no customer attached, such as some POS or draft orders, still create a sale. When the sale is created, Bloop calculates the commission from the affiliate’s campaign:

For a percentage campaign, the commission is a percent of the qualifying sale amount.
For flat per order (amount_order), it is a fixed amount for the whole order.
For flat per item (amount_item), it is a fixed amount times the qualifying item quantity.

The qualifying amount respects the campaign’s exclusions: excluded products or collections, discounts, shipping, taxes, and tips are removed from the base as configured. Tiered campaigns pick the rate the order total qualifies for, and product-specific rates override the campaign rate for listed products. See affiliate campaigns and commissions for the full rules. If the campaign has a maximum commission per customer, the commission is limited so the affiliate’s total from that customer stays within it; once the total is reached, later orders from that customer don’t create a sale.

Each sale stores a snapshot of the campaign rule that applied (its name, type, value, and which exclusions were active), so you can always see why the commission came out the way it did — even if you have since changed the campaign.

When to approve and when to reject

Situation	Decision	Why
Order fulfilled, past the return window, nothing odd	Approve	Real revenue; commission is genuinely owed.
Order cancelled before fulfilment	Reject	No revenue, so no commission.
Order returned or refunded	Reject	The revenue reversed; don’t pay on money you gave back.
Within the return window, otherwise normal	Wait, then approve	Approve after the window so a late return doesn’t leave you paying on a reversed order.
Suspicious pattern (self-referral, coupon abuse, spike of tiny orders from one affiliate)	Reject and investigate	Protects the program from fraud before money leaves. Sales where the buyer’s email matches the affiliate’s arrive pending with a self-referral note.
Manual/offline sale you can verify	Approve	Legitimate revenue tracked outside the normal flow.

Approve what represents revenue you have kept, reject what reversed or never existed, and wait when the outcome is still in doubt.

Adding a sale manually

If a sale happened outside normal tracking - an offline order, a missed attribution - Add sale records it by hand. Pick the affiliate first; the list shows affiliates assigned to a campaign, and it narrows as you type an email address. Pick an Approved affiliate: saving a sale for a pending or rejected affiliate fails. Then choose how you’re adding it:

Method	What you enter	Bloop works out
Existing order	The Shopify order — its id (`6283912842912`) or its name (`#142`)	The total sale and the commission, from the affiliate’s campaign rules
Fixed amount	The commission yourself, plus an optional total sale	Nothing — you’re stating the number

Existing order is the one to reach for whenever the order exists in Shopify: Bloop shows you the order’s total value, the total sale, and the commission it calculated before you commit, so you’re confirming a figure rather than inventing one. Fixed amount is for commission you owe that has no Shopify order behind it.

Either way you can add a note — worth doing, since a manual sale skips the automatic tracking that would otherwise vouch for it.

If the affiliate’s campaign has a maximum commission per customer, Bloop warns you when this sale would push their commission on that customer past it. Verify the order is real before you confirm.

Approving sales

Every sale carries the actions its current status allows. In the table they are icon buttons on each row (a tick approves, a cross rejects, an undo arrow moves the sale back to pending, a send arrow jumps to Payouts), and one sale is handled at a time, with no bulk select. The sale’s own page shows the same actions as labelled buttons:

Status	Available actions
Pending	Approve · Reject
Approved	Send payment (jumps to Payouts) · Mark as pending
Rejected	Mark as pending
Paid	None — a paid sale is settled

Approving a sale updates the affiliate’s approved balance and sends them an approval email. Rejecting sends a declined email instead. If you later delete or change a sale, Bloop recalculates the affiliate’s approved balance automatically. Delete order removes a sale entirely and can’t be undone; it’s unavailable once the sale is paid.

A practical rhythm: filter to Pending, work down the list approving the clean ones and rejecting returns and oddities as you go.

Each sale’s page also holds a note you can edit at any time — the place to record why you rejected something, or what a manual sale was for.

A worked example: a week of sales review

Illustrative. Monday’s queue has six pending sales across three affiliates on a 15% campaign. Four are normal fulfilled orders past the 14-day return window, so you approve them against their rule snapshot. One $120 order was refunded Friday, so you reject its $18 commission. One $200 order shipped two days ago, still inside the return window, so you leave it pending for next week. Your approved balances reflect only real, kept revenue.

When Bloop revokes a commission for you

You don’t have to catch every cancellation by hand. When a tracked order is cancelled or fully refunded, Bloop rejects its sale automatically and records why — the sale’s page shows a Revoke reason card, and the affiliate sees the same explanation on their Commissions page in the portal.

Which events trigger this is yours to set in Order Settings: cancellations, refunds, or both (the default).

Three limits are worth knowing before you rely on it:

A partial refund lowers the commission instead of revoking it. Only a fully refunded order revokes the commission. For a partial refund (when your revoke setting includes refunds), Bloop recalculates the commission on the amount the customer kept, using the rule saved on the sale. There is no revoke reason for this, the sale simply shows the new commission and total sale.
A paid commission is never revoked or recalculated. Once a sale is paid or in a payout, a later cancellation or refund can’t claw it back, which is exactly why approvals belong after your return window.
A sale you already rejected stays as it is. Its reason isn’t overwritten.

Mark as pending on a revoked sale clears the reason, so the affiliate stops seeing an explanation that no longer applies.

Exporting sales

Export your sales to CSV from the Sales tab. The file includes the order ID, campaign, affiliate name and email, customer, total sale, SKUs, commission, status, created date, and any note - useful for accounting and reconciliation.

Common mistakes to avoid

Approving before the return window closes. Approve a sale, the order comes back, and you have committed commission on reversed revenue. Time your approvals just after your typical return period.
Approving without a skim. Working down the pending list on autopilot waves through returns, cancellations, and fraud. Scan for the odd ones first.
Letting pending sales pile up unreviewed. A growing pending queue hides both money you owe and problems you have not caught. Review on a steady cadence.

Affiliate campaigns and commissions — the rules that set each commission.
Affiliate payouts — turn approved sales into payments.
Managing affiliates — the affiliates behind each sale.
Paying affiliates reliably — the rhythm that turns approvals into trust.