Shareasale Review – Is This The Best Affiliate Network?

Spend any amount of time doing affiliate marketing and you’re going to come across this very popular affiliate network even if you’re not looking for it.

Shareasale is one of the most popular affiliate networks online and it’s also my favorite to work with. On ThriversHub’s 10 best affiliate networks in 2025 list, Shareasale is #1 for beginner-friendliness, range of affiliate offers, ease-of-use, payment options and more.

It’s also my favorite network so, I admit, there’s a bit of a bias there. However, many other lists I’ve seen where they list best affiliate networks, have Shareasale at #1 also or in the top 3.

So, is Shareasale really the best affiliate network for affiliates in 2025? This Shareasale review will give you all the info from how easy it is to sign up, and payout options, to the good and the bad of the network.

Table of Contents

What Is Shareasale Affiliate Network?

Shareasale was started in 2000 and is now one of the biggest affiliate networks in the US.

According to the network’s homepage, there are over 25000 brands available to promote in a broad number of categories, including health, clothing and accessories, home and family, food, business and marketing, and many more.

Around 260 new affiliates join the network everyday, based on the stats on Shareasale’s affiliate homepage and affiliate’s earned about $1.3 billion last year alone.

Shareasale is popular among affiliates because it is easy-to-use, there’s a large number of advertisers to work with, they pay on time, and they have great linking and tracking tools to make your work easier and more efficient.

Overall, it’s a great place for bloggers and affiliates to get started when monetizing their websites with affiliate marketing.

Signing Up For Shareasale

Registering for Shareasale as an affiliate is very simple and straight-forward.

There are two ways you can sign up for Shareasale. You can either sign up directly on the Shareasale website or if you go to join a merchant from their website then you can register through their form.

To demonstrate how easy it is to sign up as an affiliate, here is the process.

When you’re on the Shareasale website, click on the “Affiliate” menu link and on that page click on the “Join our network” button. Then follow the steps outlined below.

1. Create login details

In the first step, you’ll need to create a username, a secure password and select your country.

If your country isn’t on the list then it means that you cannot have a Shareasale account due to restrictions.

Clicking the “Step 2” button indicates that you are agreeing to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Agreement for the Awin Group, the company which owns Shareasale.

2. Add basic info about your website

Next, you’ll add basic information concerning your website. To create a Shareasale account, you’ll need to have at least one website that identifies your business.

There are some Yes/No questions that you’ll need to answer. Providing these details will help to speed up the application approval.

You’ll need to answer questions about adult content and promotional strategies you use for your website. The answer to all of these questions should ideally be “no”. As a beginner, this would probably be the case. However, you should answer each question honestly as it pertains to your website.

Tip: When entering the website address, just add the domain name without the “https://” part – eg. thrivershub.com.

3. Add your email address

In the third step, you will add your email address so you can communicate with Shareasale.

Adding an email that is on the same website you used to register will speed up the application process but it is not necessary. You can submit a standard application with the email address that you use everyday.

Answer “yes” if you would like to submit an email address from your website or “no” if it’s a regular email address like a “gmail” or other email address that you have access to. A form field will appear for you to add the info.

4. Add your contact info

Shareasale also needs your address as default for sending checks. In this step, you’ll be asked to add your name, address, phone number, and the name of the organization checks will be payable to.

You will also need to add a description of your website and how to plan to promote the merchants in Shareasale. This will be visible to merchants when you apply to individual affiliate programs. It does not have to be detailed as there are only 240 characters available for you to type your description.

There are also two additional questions about your website – whether or not it’s an incentivized website and if you own the domain name you provided.

5. Add payment info

The final step in the registration process is to add info on how you would like to get paid.

There is information in this section on how payments work and the options available to you. You can choose to fill this section later if you’re unable to make the decision at that time. You will also be able to change your selection after your application has been accepted.

Choose your option or hit the “Complete sign up” button to submit your application.

6. Agree to the Shareasale user agreement

One final step is to read and agree to the Shareasale terms of agreement. This is important so that you know the rules and to avoid getting your account suspended at any time.

Finding Affiliate Programs On Shareasale

It’s easy to find merchants inside Shareasale. Once logged in, you can click on the “Merchant” menu link at the top and then select “Search for merchants” to go to the programs dashboard.

The affiliate programs dashboard will show various ways to find merchants.

From the results of a search, you can reorder the listings by a number of criteria. This can be by 7 or 30-day EPC, sales commission, alphabetically, cookie length, and more.

You can also see on each program listing, the 30-day stats for the program. These stats include average sale, average commission, reversal rate, cookie length, and product datafeed. Each listing will also show you the current program status, how long they’ve been active, and whether they auto-approve or not.

Shareasale has some well-known brand names across a great deal of categories and niches. They probably don’t have as many big brands as CJ Affiliate or Impact but there are a lot of recognizable names.

Here’s a handful of affiliate programs you might recognize that you’ll find on Shareasale.

If you’re searching for affiliate programs in your niche, you can start with the appropriate category and then use program keyword tags that appear in each program listing.

A lot of times, you will know the program that you want to work with and can search for it in Shareasale once you know they’re available in the network.

Shareasale provides an overall good experience for finding affiliate programs. This is enhanced by other menu links for finding programs with:

Joining Affiliate Programs

There are two ways you can join affiliate programs. From the merchant website, you can follow the join link from their affiliate page and then log into Shareasale if you’re already an affiliate or sign up directly if you’re new to the network.

Or you can search for affiliate programs in Shareasale once you’re an approved publisher and join the programs.

Some affiliate programs will auto-approve you so that you can start promoting right away. Most of the programs though, will require that you wait for approval.

You can click on the “Join Program” button next to the listing to quickly join a program or you can click through to view more about what he program has to offer.

One the advertiser page, you can see more information such as:

There’s a lot you can see on the advertiser’s page which makes it easier for you to make your decision of whether or not to join and promote that particular merchant. Once you’re approved, you can also see your default link on the page and a “get links” button in place of the “join program” button.

Getting Approved

While some affiliate programs on Shareasale auto-approve affiliates, the majority do not and you’ll have to wait to be accepted before promoting those merchants.

The merchant would usually just want to vet the quality of the affiliate before accepting them.

To help you get approved, consider the following.

Additionally, if you really would love to promote a particular program and get declined, you can find the merchant’s contact by checking their affiliate program page on their website and sending them an email stating your case. This has worked for me before and some affiliate managers would tell you what they’re looking for or why they declined you.

Creating Links / Program Resources

Your affiliate link is what tracks and credits sales to you and Shareasale let’s you create them easily.

This is one of my favorite things about Shareasale. There are some very cool resources available to create links in different ways.

To get started creating links, you can click on the “Links” menu item at the top of the dashboard and then click on “Get a Link/banner”. This will open up a page where you can see all of your joined affiliate programs. From there you an get a link or banner to promote the program.

Merchants have banners and text links listed in their links section. You can get a general link or sometimes there are links that link to different parts of their website so you can send your audience to different pages.

Some merchants even have videos that you can embed on your website that will track your clicks and give you credit for any sales.

You just need to copy and paste the code into your website and there is even the option to just get the click URL only.

Shareasale also has some cool link resources for creating additional links.

There’s a bookmarklet that you can drag to your browser. Then when you’re on a joined merchant website, you can just click the bookmarklet and grab an affiliate link to any page.

The Custom Link tool is also neat. I’ve used this to create short links to paged on a joined merchant site where there isn’t a specific link in the merchant links section.

I’m not to familiar with the other two options but they’re also available link tools that can be used to showcase merchant products.

For datafeed affiliates, you can grab datafeeds to add to your website if they’re available from the merchant. Lots of ecommerce merchants have datafeeds.

Hats off to Shareasale for making it easy for affiliates to grab links and having so many ways for affiliates to work with merchant links.

Earning Commissions & Getting Paid

When you start making sales on Shareasale, you’ll know as soon as you log in. Your commission balance is shown in the header of the dashboard and also on the right hand side of the screen.

There is also an activity feed that will show any sales you make. Elsewhere on your dashboard, you can see your 30-day stats, showing sales, clicks, commissions, and more for your top 5 merchants.

Using the reports link in your header menu, you can also dig deeper to see where sales are coming from and how your links are performing.

To get paid, you’ll need to meet the minimum threshold of $50 in sales commissions. These will need to be released commissions as merchants will usually hold commissions for a period of time to cover any refunds or returns by customers you referred.

Once your commissions are approved and meets the threshold, you’ll be paid on the 20th of each month. Shareasale has always been reliable and paid commissions on time since I’ve been with the network.

Available Payment Methods

Shareasale has a number of payment methods that should work for everyone. There are three main ones:

The quickest and most convenient of these are direct bank deposits. There are also wire deposits if you choose but this comes at a cost of $29.

The method I chose is Payoneer because I don’t live in the United States and I previously had them send me checks before they had this option. Payoneer is convenient as well but takes about 2-5 days to get to your account after it’s sent by Shareasale.

If none of these options work, you can always choose to receive a check. Besides the regular mail option, you can have your checks sent via FedEx but there’s a cost for this option which increases depending on if it’s sent within the US, to Canada, or internationally.

Shareasale Support & Resources

I have been using Shareasale since about 2009 and I’ve only had to contact support twice. On both occasions, I received timely replies and the staff was courteous and knew how to fix my issue.

Reading other people’s experience though, it seems like this is an area where they could improve.

To get support, you can click on the “Help” link in the top right of the dashboard. This will take you to a knowledge-base (Help Center) where you’ll find questions and answers to common issues.

If you really need a human to deal with you, then in the Help Center you can click on the “submit a request” link to send a ticket explaining your issue.

Shareasale Pros & Cons

There’s a lot to love about Shareasale and very little to hate on. This is actually my favorite affiliate network to work with for the reasons I’m going to outline in this section.

Pros (What I Love About Shareasale)

Among my favorite things about Shareasale is the fact that they have multiple payment options so everyone can choose what works best for them. Unfortunately, there is no PayPal option so that may be a con for some.

Linking tools are another favorite and resources such as newsletter previews and affiliate program collections ensure that you have a great experience with this affiliate network.

Cons (What I Don’t Like About Shareasale)

I haven’t had any trouble the two times I had to contact support before. However, I did see some complaints about Shareasale’s support while looking at other reviews to see what others thought about the network.

When you click on “Help” in your dashboard, Shareasale sends you to their knowledge-base which is understandable. Then from there you could submit a ticket which you’ll have to wait on a response for.

This is standard for most other affiliate networks. But maybe it’s not to obvious how to contact an actual human.

Not much to complain about here. I’m satisfied with my experience using Shareasale.

Final Words

If you’re thinking about joining Shareasale and had some doubts, this affiliate network has been around for over 20 years, is very trust-worthy and popular among small and mid-sized businesses as well as the affiliate marketing community.

It is very easy to sign up, find affiliate programs, and use the network in general. For all of these reasons, Shareasale is a personal favorite and is #1 on Thrivehub’s 10 best affiliate networks to join in 2025 list.

So go ahead and find monetization opportunities for your affiliate website using Shareasale. These are over 20,000 affiliate programs waiting for you to choose from.