Definition
Shaving, sometimes called shave, is a form of affiliate fraud committed by the advertiser or network against the affiliate: deliberately under-reporting the conversions, revenue or player activity that an affiliate actually generated, so that the affiliate is paid less than they are owed. It can take many forms — dropping a percentage of conversions from the report, delaying or "losing" postbacks, applying stricter-than-agreed qualification silently, misattributing an affiliate's conversions to a house account, or understating RevShare net revenue by inflating deductible costs.
Shaving is possible because the advertiser controls the system of record. The affiliate sees their own tracker's numbers, but the payable figure comes from the advertiser's platform, and any gap has to be argued after the fact.
A small, consistent shave is hard to distinguish from normal tracking discrepancy — postback loss, deduplication, timezone cutoffs — which is what makes it effective and what makes reconciliation important.
In context
Affiliates detect shaving through disciplined reconciliation. They run their own independent tracker, pass a click ID on every link, log every conversion event with a timestamp, and compare their totals against the advertiser's report every payment cycle.
A stable, small gap that goes both ways over time is normal. A gap that is always in the advertiser's favour, that grows as the affiliate scales, that appears suddenly after a manager change, or that concentrates on the highest-value conversions is a shaving pattern and warrants a formal dispute with the logs attached.
Reputation is the main deterrent. Affiliate communities share experiences, and a network that gets a reputation for shaving loses its best partners, so established networks with a long track record and transparent reporting are lower-risk.
New or opaque programmes are tested with a small, closely-tracked batch before any scale-up, and affiliates favour deals with granular, real-time reporting and a clear dispute process precisely because those features make shaving harder to hide.
Worked example
An affiliate's tracker records 512 qualified FTDs for the month; the advertiser's report shows 468. Reconciliation attributes 9 to known postback loss and 5 to deduplication, leaving an unexplained 30 — all on the higher-payout GEO — that appeared only after a new account manager took over. The affiliate opens a dispute with full logs and pauses scaling on that offer.
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