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 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.
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.
Set Up #
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.
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.
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 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 you have received, any new registrations that have been made, and who your top affiliates are.
The dashboard also gives you various notifications to help keep you up to date with the actions you need to perform. For example, if the time has come to make a new payout, you will be notified on this page.
Affiliates #
You can see a concise list of all your affiliates on the Affiliates tab. It will show you a brief rundown of their performance and whether there are any unpaid commissions. You can also get a more in-depth overview of each one by clicking on them. This will allow you to approve registrations and set custom rates for them.
Referrals #
In the Referrals tab, you will find information about the individual referrals to your store. It will tell you which orders came from which affiliates, and you can also open corresponding orders in the WooCommerce interface.
The section also tells you how the commission was calculated for each referral. If you’ve applied lots of custom rates, knowing the source of each commission can come in handy.
Payouts #
Two menus relate to your payouts in Solid Affiliate. These are:
- Payouts – Where you can see all completed payouts.
- Pay Affiliates – Where you can find the tool that you use to make affiliate payments. After making a payment via this tool, wait for that payout to appear in the Payouts tab.
Solid Affiliates’ pay affiliates tool gives two options:
- Use the PayPal bulk payout integration to make affiliate payments via PayPal automatically.
- Generate a CSV file that you can use to make affiliate payouts manually.
Visit Tracking #
You can then track all visits to your store via the Visits tab. The details found here will include visits that do not result in a sale and the URL they were referred from.
Creatives #
The Creatives tab allows you to create new creatives for your affiliates to use These will show up on the affiliate front-end dashboard.
Reports #
In the Reports tab, you will have a detailed breakdown of every aspect of your affiliate program. The main Overview tab will give you summaries of all your sales, payouts, income, and payouts. Four other tabs will give you more specific data about:
- Affiliates
- Referrals
- Payouts
- Visits
Full Documentation #
To view the full help documentation at Solid Affiliate’s website, click here.
