> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://ctracker-docs.keywordrush.com/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://ctracker-docs.keywordrush.com/affiliate-networks/loading-shops.md).

# Loading shops from a network

Every shop on your site starts as a record your affiliate network sends you: its name, its web address, the commission you earn, the currency it trades in, how long it holds an order before approving it.

Cashback Tracker fetches that list from each network you have switched on, and keeps it up to date in the background. This page is about that list — where it comes from, how to watch it arrive, and what to do when something goes wrong.

### The first load

Switching a network on is what starts it.

Go to `Cashback Tracker` → `Networks`, press **Configure** on the network, enter the credentials it needs, tick **Enable network** and press **Save**.

The window closes and the network's **Shops** column starts moving. You do not have to press anything else, and you do not have to stay on the page — closing it does not stop the work.

If the credentials are wrong or missing, the plugin refuses to switch the network on and tells you which field is the problem. Nothing is loaded until it is happy.

### Watching it arrive

The **Shops** column on the Networks screen is the whole status at a glance.

| What you see                      | What it means                                                                                                    |
| --------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| `— never refreshed`               | The network has never been loaded.                                                                               |
| `starting…`                       | The load is queued and about to begin.                                                                           |
| `45% · 180 of 400`                | Running. 180 shops so far, out of the 400 the network says it has.                                               |
| `180 shops so far…`               | Running, but this network does not tell us its total in advance.                                                 |
| `412` and `refreshed 2 hours ago` | Finished cleanly.                                                                                                |
| `408` and `4 could not be loaded` | Finished, but some shops could not be read. See below.                                                           |
| `0` and `failed 6 hours ago`      | The network could not be reached.                                                                                |
| `5` and `not refreshing`          | The network is switched off. Those 5 shops are still on your site, but nothing is updating them.                 |
| `—`                               | This network has no shop list to fetch. Custom networks are like this: their shops are the ones you add by hand. |

The column updates itself while a load is running, roughly every five seconds, for as long as you have the Networks page open.

![A shop refresh in progress](https://3545740495-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2F-M69sU0hfZj3QsteYxmI%2Fuploads%2Fgit-blob-215b81363561b1d7cddd3a115b008b0a08487eee%2Fshops-sync-running.webp?alt=media)

### Why it can take a while

Affiliate networks limit how often you may ask them for anything. Cashback Tracker respects those limits by loading your shops in small batches with a pause between them, rather than making one enormous request that the network would reject.

That means a big shop list is a slow job, and that is normal. A few hundred shops on a network that allows twenty requests a minute takes something like twenty to forty minutes. Nothing is stuck. You can close the browser, and the work carries on.

### Refreshing by hand

Two buttons on the Networks screen:

* **Refresh shops**, on the network's own row — load that one network's shop list again.
* **Refresh all shops**, beside the page title — do it for every switched-on network. They are started a few minutes apart rather than all at once, so ten networks do not hit ten APIs in the same minute.

**Refresh shops** is greyed out while a load is already running, and absent for a network that is switched off or has no shop list to fetch.

### The Shops panel

Press **Details** on any network for the full picture: how many shops are stored, when it last refreshed and how that went, anything it could not read, and the last five refreshes before this one.

It also has **Stop**, which abandons a load that is running. Nothing already fetched is lost, and nothing is removed.

### "Completed with problems"

Sometimes a refresh finishes having failed to read some of the shops — a network hiccups, refuses one request out of two hundred, or sends a row in a shape the plugin does not recognise.

When that happens the refresh is marked **Completed with problems**, and the panel lists exactly which shops could not be read and why.

**A refresh like that never removes anything from your site.** This is deliberate and it is worth understanding, because it is the difference between a temporary network glitch and a shop disappearing from your directory. If the plugin cannot tell "this network no longer carries this shop" apart from "asking about this shop failed", it assumes the shop is fine and leaves it alone. Shops are only ever removed after a refresh that read the whole list without losing anything — see [When a shop is paused, rejected or disappears](/affiliate-networks/shop-status-policies.md).

So an occasional "completed with problems" is nothing to act on. The same shops failing every time is worth looking into: usually credentials that have partly expired, or a shop the network has left in a broken state.

### Keeping the list up to date

`Cashback Tracker` → `Settings` → `General`, under **Shops and shop pages**:

* **Refresh shop lists** — how often every switched-on network is refreshed in the background. **Daily** suits almost everyone. **Weekly** is fine if your networks rarely change. **Disabled** means the list only ever updates when you press **Refresh shops**.

Refreshes are spread out rather than all started at once, so ten networks do not hit ten APIs in the same minute.

New shops that appear in a network's list are added, and shop pages are created for them if you have that switched on. Shops that vanish from the list are handled by the policies on the same settings page.

### When nothing happens

If a load never starts, or the column sits still for a very long time, the usual cause is that scheduled tasks are not running on your site at all — which stops far more than shop loading. Cashback Tracker shows a warning across the admin when it detects this. See [Scheduled tasks](/running-your-site/scheduled-tasks.md).

### Related

* [The Shop catalog](/shops-and-cashback-rates/shop-catalog.md) — every shop from every network in one list, with the date each was last seen.
* [Shop pages](/shops-and-cashback-rates/shop-pages.md) — turning a shop into a page on your site.
* [When a shop is paused, rejected or disappears](/affiliate-networks/shop-status-policies.md)