How affiliate commissions work: tracked, pending, approved, available, paid

A sale being tracked does not mean a commission is owed. A commission being approved does not mean it has been funded. Money being available does not mean it has been paid.

Those distinctions sound bureaucratic until you are the publisher who budgeted a pending commission, or the advertiser who assumed a tracked sale was already a cost. Collapsing the states is how affiliate programs lose trust.

Here is the full lifecycle, one state at a time.

The six states

The order is not decorative. Each transition has a different owner and a different failure mode.

Tracked: the conversion exists

A customer clicks a publisher's link, buys, and the checkout reports the sale back to the platform with the click identifier attached. The platform records a conversion.

At this point the platform knows a sale happened and who should get credit if the sale holds. It does not yet know whether the customer will keep the product, whether the order is fraudulent, or whether the advertiser will contest it.

Tracked is a record, not a promise. The tracking guide covers how the click ID reaches the checkout and what happens when it does not.

Pending: the validation period

Most programs wait before paying. The waiting window is the validation period. On Slice it equals the product's returns period plus seven days, capped at 67 days.

During that window the commission is pending. The advertiser can still decline it with a reason. Typical reasons include:

• The order was fraudulent or used a stolen payment method.
• The sale was duplicated or already attributed to another partner.
• The customer cancelled before the return window closed.
• The partner broke an agreed promotion rule.

A pending commission is an estimate. Publishers should not budget it as income, and advertisers should not treat it as a finalized cost.

Approved: validated, not funded

When the validation period ends without a decline, the commission becomes approved. It is now considered a real sale.

Approved is where a lot of programs stop in practice. The platform has agreed the publisher earned the commission, but the advertiser still needs to make the money available. Until that happens, the commission cannot be paid.

This is the gap that makes "approved" different from "available." An approved commission is a confirmed obligation; an available commission is a funded one.

Available: the money has cleared

Available means the advertiser's funds were collected and cleared. The commission can now be included in a payout.

For publishers, this is the first state that should affect financial planning. For advertisers, this is the point where the cost has actually left the business.

Paid: the provider confirmed it

Paid means the payment provider confirmed the transfer. Not "the platform clicked send," not "the payout is scheduled" — confirmed by the provider.

That distinction matters because payment rails can fail. A payout can be initiated and still bounce. The only honest definition of paid is authoritative confirmation.

Declined and reversed: the money comes back

A commission can leave the lifecycle in two ways.

Declined happens during validation, when the advertiser rejects the sale with a reason. The commission never becomes approved.

Reversed happens after approval, usually because of a refund, chargeback or lost dispute. A full refund reverses the full commission. A partial refund shrinks it in proportion. A lost dispute behaves like a full refund.

Reversals are not an edge case; they are part of running a program. A platform that cannot represent them cleanly will eventually produce reports that do not match reality.

Renewals: the same lifecycle, again

For subscriptions, each renewal is a new conversion. It is tracked, validated according to the campaign's rules, approved and funded. If the campaign pays only on the first payment, later renewals create no commission at all.

A common mistake is to treat the first payment's commission as recurring revenue. It is recurring only if the campaign says so and the customer keeps paying.

What publishers should take from this

• Treat tracked and pending as estimates, never as available money.
• Read the validation period before promoting a product. A 60-day wait changes the value of a commission.
• Ask for the decline reason when something is rejected. A good platform records it.
• Do not assume an approved commission is payable. Funding is a separate step.
• Keep your own record of clicks and sales so you can reconcile.

What advertisers should take from this

• Fund approved commissions promptly. A program that validates sales but never funds them stops attracting good partners.
• Review declines on time. Ignoring the validation window is not the same as approving.
• Make the refund and dispute process explicit, both to the publisher and to your finance team.
• Do not rewrite settled history. Correct it with an adjustment or reversal entry so the audit trail stays intact.
• Reconcile your payment provider's records against the platform's conversions. A missed webhook is a silent attribution failure.

Where Slice is today

Slice tracks conversions and turns each credited sale into a pending commission. When validation ends, the commission becomes approved; advertisers can also decline with a reason or approve early.

Advertiser funding and publisher payouts are still being built. Until they are live, nothing on Slice moves real money, and the dashboard labels commissions as estimates rather than withdrawable balances. The fees and payouts documentation states the current status, and the pricing page explains the fee that applies once money does move.

That honesty is deliberate. A lifecycle page is only useful if it describes what the product actually does. For the wider context, read what affiliate marketing is or compare free and paid affiliate platforms.