Tag Archives: Affiliate

Is This the Best Affiliate Plugin for WooCommerce?

[ad_1] Looking for an effective way to promote your WooCommerce store? If so, launching an affiliate program might just be what you need to spread the word about your eCommerce business.  Many store owners assume that affiliate programs are only useful for big companies, but the truth is that even a smaller business can benefit from having its own affiliate program. It’s a great way to build an army of loyal advocates who are excited to promote your offerings. Solid Affiliate is a brand new WordPress plugin that allows you to add an affiliate or referral program to any WooCommerce site. People can sign up as affiliates for your business and you’ll be able to keep up to date on any sales they make. The plugin also gives you control over the commissions you pay and offers multiple gateways for making affiliate payments. Okay, but how do I set it up? In this Solid Affiliate review, we’ll give you a hands-on look at how to create a self-hosted WooCommerce affiliate program using the native WordPress plugin. Plus, we’ll highlight some of the plugin’s best features to help you make the most of your investment (Solid Affiliate is generous with pricing, but it’s still an investment in your site). Solid Affiliate Review: A Quick Look at the Features Solid Affiliate is a one-stop solution for launching and managing a referral program on WooCommerce. It comes with: Coupon referrals – link WooCommerce coupons to affiliates. Real-time tracking – track sales, payouts, and other data as soon as it generates.  Flexible commissions – set one commission rate with the option to adjust it for specific products or affiliates. Affiliate cookie life – choose how many days the referral affiliate cookie remains valid. Refund protection – set a refund grace period for paying commissions. Automatic payouts – Pay your affiliates via PayPal or export a CSV for manual payments with just a few clicks. WooCommerce Subscriptions compatibility – set up recurring commission rates in WooCommerce subscriptions. All major builders supported – the plugin works with Divi, Oxygen, Elementor, ec. And more. Hands-On with Solid Affiliate for WooCommerce/WordPress Now that you have an idea of Solid Affiliate’s features, let’s walk through the setup process. Solid Affiliate Set Up Solid Affiliate is pretty much plug-and-play. First, go to your WordPress dashboard and choose Plugins → Add New. Then upload the plugin’s zip file and select  Install Now. Once installed and activated, a setup wizard will appear when you open the new Solid Affiliate tab in your WordPress admin. Through it, you can set up a page for your frontend affiliate portal and configure outgoing emails: Article Continues Below But that’s about it—the plugin’s settings are where the real action happens. Solid Affiliate Settings To configure how your referral program functions, you’ll need to go to Solid Affiliate → Settings → General. Here, you’ll configure how your commissions work, including: The default commission rate, whether a percentage or a flat rate. The payout currency and tracking cookie period. Whether to give commissions on total sales or only on sales to new customers. Whether to omit tax and/shipping from commission calculations. Affiliate Portal & Registration in Solid Affiliate In the Settings menu, you’ll also find other tabs for configuring different functions of the plugin. One of them is for Affiliate Portal & Registration. This tab lets you manage the frontend interface for affiliates, choose the fields to display on the registration form and require admin approval for new affiliates if desired. The registration form has an Affiliate Notes field that inserts a How will you promote us? Box. However, there’s no way to add custom fields to your forms. It would have been nice to include other fields, such as one for a physical address, which is crucial if you need an affiliate’s location for filing taxes in your state. Other Tabs: Integration, Emails, Misc & Recurring Referrals Solid Affiliate’s Settings also has an Integrations tab. This tab lets you set up PayPal and Mailchimp.  The next tab, Emails, allows you to customize the emails sent to affiliate managers and affiliates. You get two templates for each party, which you can customize using merge tags and the Classic editor. Misc has some random settings, like whether you want Solid Affiliate to reject unpaid referrals if a purchase is refunded. Lastly, the Recurring Referrals tab lets you select whether to pay commissions on just the first subscription payment or every recurring subscription. There’s also an option to set a custom rate, such as giving $100 flat for the first payment and a 2% commission for all recurring ones.  Assigning WooCommerce Coupons to Affiliates Solid Affiliate for WooCommerce also offers a coupon-based option for crediting affiliates. Basically, you give affiliates coupons that they promote to shoppers. So when a shopper uses a coupon, the plugin automatically credits the affiliate with the sale. Solid affiliate syncs with the native WooCommerce coupon system, making it give affiliate coupons. Article Continues Below Creating Custom Commission Rates Solid Affiliate also lets you override the default commission rate for certain products, product categories and affiliates. You can choose your own custom referral rate when editing an individual product, product category, or affiliate. For instance, when you edit an affiliate, the plugin will provide you with new fields to control the commission for that affiliate. If you don’t want to pay commissions on certain products, Solid Affiliate has you covered. While editing individual products, you can choose to make them ineligible for commissions. I can’t recall any WordPress affiliate plugin that offers this option. That’s it for the setup. Now let’s see how to manage your affiliate program inside Solid Affiliate. Managing Your New Affiliate Program After setting up your affiliate program, head over to the main Solid Affiliate menu to discover tools to manage affiliates, make payments, view reports, and more. Here’s what you’ll find: Dashboard You can keep track of a detailed overview of your affiliate program through the Dashboard tab. This page will show you metrics such as your recent revenue, referrals

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Is It the Best WordPress Affiliate Plugin? (2021)

[ad_1] Searching for a way to create an affiliate program for your WordPress site? In our hands-on AffiliateWP review, we’ll help you decide if this plugin is the right tool to create an affiliate program for your eCommerce store, online course, membership site, and more. Spoiler alert – I think that AffiliateWP is probably the all-around best WordPress affiliate plugin when it comes to: Built-in tracking integrations. Features and flexibility. Longevity (it will be around for a while because it comes from a reputable developer – the same team behind Easy Digital Downloads). In our full review, I’ll help you understand why I say that, and I’ll also highlight some negatives and key details to understand. Here’s everything that I’ll cover: Let’s dig in! ⚙️ AffiliateWP Review: Introducing the Features In a nutshell, AffiliateWP helps you create an affiliate program for your WordPress site. Other people can register with your affiliate program and AffiliateWP will automatically track the traffic and sales that they send you so that you can reward them with a commission. It offers built-in integrations with most popular WordPress eCommerce plugins, membership plugins, and LMS plugins for easy setup – there’s no complicated tracking to configure. AffiliateWP also offers lots of flexibility for setting up your affiliate program exactly as you want it to be. Let’s go through it… Built-in Referral Tracking Integrations One of the really cool things about AffiliateWP is that it has one-click integrations with popular plugins. This makes the setup process super simple. Basically, you just check a box and AffiliateWP will automatically start tracking conversions – no need to mess around with tracking pixels or code. Here are the built-in integrations that it has: AffiliateWP doesn’t include a dedicated integration for LearnDash’s built-in payments feature, but you can easily use AffiliateWP with LearnDash if you use EDD or WooCommerce as your LearnDash payment processor. Learn more about LearnDash. If you’re not using one of those platforms, you can still set up tracking yourself using the affiliate conversion script shortcode. Key Features One of AffiliateWP’s high points is that it gives you a lot of features for managing your affiliate program. For example, let’s look at commissions. You get: Global commissions – either flat rate or percentage. Option to override commissions on a per-product basis or exclude certain products. Custom affiliate tiers to reward high performers. Option to set custom rates for individual affiliates. Lifetime commissions. Optio to award commissions for new user signups. Custom affiliate coupons. To pay out your affiliates, you can use: The developer’s custom payout service, which supports 31+ countries. The built-in PayPal payouts integrations. Manual payouts. Other useful features include: Detailed reporting and stats. Option to add creatives. Bulk import/export for affiliates, payouts, referrals, etc. Zapier integration. Your affiliates also get lots of useful features: Front-end affiliate dashboard. URL generator. Campaign sub-ids (affiliates can add their own tracking IDs – a really useful feature for them). Statistics/reporting, including graphs. Notification emails for new referrals – i.e. when they get a sale. Area to view creatives. This is just a taste of the many available features – I’ll share more when I talk about the 33+ available add-ons. 🆚 Key Benefits of AffiliateWP vs Alternatives I would say there are a few benefits to using AffiliateWP over working with an affiliate network like ShareASale, CJ, etc. Cost/Commissions The biggest benefit of using AffiliateWP is that you can save a ton on costs/commissions. With AffiliateWP, you’ll pay a one-time cost ($149-$249) to set up your affiliate program*, but there are no ongoing costs based on the volume of commissions you pay out. It’s 100% a flat fee. Let’s compare that to ShareASale. With ShareASale, you’ll pay a one-time $550 fee to add your platform. Then, you’ll also pay an ongoing fee for every commission that you pay out, which is 20% of your commissions. So if you pay an affiliate a $5 commission, you also have to pay ShareASale $1, which makes the total cost of that commission $6 to you. Other affiliate networks can be even worse! For example, CJ charges a one-time $3,000 signup fee plus a $500 per year fee plus a fee based on your sales/commissions. Overall, using AffiliateWP to create your own affiliate program is significantly cheaper. *You’ll probably want to renew your license to continue receiving support/updates, so you’ll need to pay this every year. Own Your Audience Another big benefit is that you get to own your audience and have a direct relationship with all of your affiliates. With an affiliate network, your affiliates are controlled by the network (though you can obviously still contact them). This puts you in a somewhat weak position. For example, if you’re negotiating fees with your network, they have leverage because they control the relationship. With AffiliateWP, there’s no middleman getting between you and your affiliates. Of course, the downside here is that you’ll also need to build your affiliate numbers from scratch – you won’t benefit from the built-in pool of affiliates that a network has. Flexibility Finally, you also just get more flexibility because AffiliateWP is an open-source, GPL-licensed WordPress plugin. You can edit the code as needed to create the perfect setup for your affiliate program, which isn’t possible if you use a network. 🔧 How to Create a WordPress Affiliate Program With AffiliateWP Now, let’s look at what it’s like to create an affiliate program using AffiliateWP – I think you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to set up the core features. For this section, I will be just using the core plugin – but I’ll also talk about the many features that you can add with extensions after this. I’ll use WooCommerce for this example, but remember that AffiliateWP also integrates with all of the other tools that I mentioned above. Setting Up Your Integration(s) When you first activate AffiliateWP, the first thing that you’ll want to do is set up your integration(s) – AKA what you want to track.

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