AffiliateWP Review: Is This the Best WordPress Affiliate Plugin?

Are you looking for an effective way to market your WordPress site? If so, an affiliate program might be exactly what you need for your online business to reach new audiences.

Through an affiliate program, you will be amplifying your products through the voice and channels of others, while they earn a commission off of your sales. This lucrative approach is a proven strategy that will actively promote your products and services.

As good as it sounds, how do you create an affiliate program for your WordPress website with minimal investment? Thanks to AffiliateWP, you now have access to a well-developed affiliate system that can boost your sales.

The plugin integrates with several prominent WordPress eCommerce and membership plugins, allowing you to create a wide network of affiliates. Your affiliates also get their own space to generate URLs, track their referrals, and earn commissions while advocating for your products.

In this AffiliateWP review, we take a closer look at the plugin’s features, and more importantly – how AffiliateWP can help you launch your affiliate program.

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How can AffiliateWP Help you?

The goal of AffiliateWP is to help you set up and run an affiliate program successfully from your WordPress site. The plugin comes packed with over a dozen features, each designed to guide you through the different phases of an affiliate program.

At a glimpse, AffiliateWP enables you to do the following:

• Automated or manual approvals of affiliates
• Offer affiliate registration forms
• Sales reports and tracking of affiliates
• Fix global and custom referral fees on a per-product, per-affiliate basis
• Bulk pay your affiliates
• Integrate your affiliate program with third-party solutions

In essence, with AffiliateWP, you can create and manage an affiliate program efficiently right from your WordPress window.

How to Set up AffiliateWP?

Once you download and install AffiliateWP, the first thing to do is to customize the settings to suit your site. The plugin offers an array of integrations that will take care of the different aspects of running your affiliate program.

Integrations

AffiliateWP comes with numerous integrations allowing you to access third-party eCommerce services, subscriptions, memberships, contact forms, and more.

For instance, by enabling the WooCommerce add-on, you can connect coupon codes to affiliate accounts, set per-product commission rates, and manage referrals.

Another useful integration is the PayPal add-on that enables you to accept payments and donations with a single click using the PayPal button.

You can find these under integrations under

Affiliates > Settings > Integrations

When you have selected the desired integrations, proceed to save your changes. Later you can configure each of these integrations to your liking to activate referral programs, set commission rates, and such.

It is not necessary to select any of these integrations on a manual basis. Instead, AffiliateWP also grants use of shortcodes to give access to its different features.

Note: AffiliateWP comes with both official as well as third-party add-ons. A few of the supported integrations might require you to sign-up and pay for their services separately.

Affiliate Signups

Through AffiliateWP, you have the option to add affiliates both manually and automatically. These affiliate accounts will be registered by default as new accounts in the WordPress database.

Adding Affiliates Manually

If your affiliate already has a WordPress account, you can register them using the respective username or email ID. For each user, you can further set the parameters for the affiliate program, such as:

• Affiliate status
• Referral type
• Referral rate
• Payment email for third-party systems such as PayPal.

Adding Affiliates Through Registration Forms

As your business expands, it might not be possible to manually add affiliates. Instead, the efficient way is to allow new users to register themselves as your affiliates.

AffiliateWP gives you the control to approve each affiliate manually, so you can choose individual interests which align with your brand and products. If you would like to turn on self-registration, go to:

Affiliate > Misc > Allow Affiliate Registration

When selected, the registration form will be automatically added to the ‘Affiliate Area’ of your WordPress site.

Here you can also enable the ‘Require Approval’, which means that your affiliates will be registered with a pending status on your site. You will receive an email when a new affiliate registers, which will require you to take action to approve or reject their application.

Note: You can also use a shortcode to customize the registration form as you like. You can add new fields to gather more information about the applicants, such as their website, and how the affiliates plan to promote your site. These details will help you make informed decisions on whether or not to approve an affiliate.

Auto-Registering New Affiliates

If you do not want to personally assess each affiliate, AffiliateWP also has an Auto Register option. This feature is particularly useful if you are importing several accounts at once.

AffiliateWP Plugin Overview

The ‘Overview’ tab offers you heaps of relevant information concerning your affiliate program. Here you can get a list of all the affiliate accounts, as well as the pending and rejected applications.

AffiliateWP also displays the total and the individual earnings of the affiliates for your reference. In addition, you will also have access to the Payout Reports that will reveal the amount paid out since the user joined your program or for a custom period.

Performance reports and trend graphs are also available, which indicates how much business the affiliates have been bringing to your site.

This is a quick feature helpful in analyzing who your most valuable affiliates are. It will give you the intelligence to adjust the commission rates and offer exclusive promotions to individual affiliates.

Setting the Affiliate Commissions

The affiliate commission is the amount the affiliate will receive upon each successful sale. You can set the amount as a percentage or a flat rate.

Of course, you might want to set different commission rates for different affiliates or opt for a global rate for all your referrals.

As we mentioned above, you can do this individually for each affiliate. Alternatively, if you want to set a global amount, you can do it in:

Affiliates > General

This will fix a commission rate that applies to all affiliates unless specified otherwise.

Sharing Brand Assets With Your Affiliates

Let’s suppose that you are running a promotion on your site. It would be beneficial if your affiliates can also highlight the respective campaign to drive maximum traffic to your website.

In order to facilitate this, AffiliateWP goes one step ahead to help you provide creative solutions for your affiliates.

You can upload any brand assets such as a text link, banners, images or graphics to make them available for your affiliates.

You can attach these by heading over to the ‘Creatives’ tab of your AffiliateWP dashboard. These brand assets will also be accompanied by a link that leads to a page on your website.

AffiliateWP labels these brand assets as ‘Creatives’. Users can simply copy-paste the HTML to include links to your posts or landing pages.

Paying your Affiliates

AffiliateWP offers a number of payment methods to pay affiliates their referral earnings. These include:

• Online payment system
• Bank transfers
• PayPal add-on

The plugin comes with fully integrated payout services where you can opt for a mass payout system, or pay a single affiliate. AffiliateWP will generate a CSV file with your affiliate names, unpaid earnings, and the respective email addresses for their payment method.

This file is formatted specifically to match the systems of mass payment options such as PayPal.

In case you need to make individual payments, that option is also available through third-party payment systems and individual bank transfers.

User’s Affiliate Area

Affiliate Area primarily serves as your affiliates’ dashboard on your site. By default, AffiliateWP will create an Affiliate Area page on your WordPress site.

The space serves as a front-end part of your program, where affiliates can log in to their accounts and check their statuses. The section will provide an overview of their earnings and allow them to generate affiliate links.

You can further customize this page using shortcodes to change the fields, and the appearance.

Here is a breakdown of all options available by default in the Affiliate Area.

• Affiliate URLs, where affiliates can generate custom links for their websites for your products or site.
• Statistics will provide them with an account of paid and unpaid earnings, the number of referrals, conversion rates, commission percentages, and more.
• Graphs reveal the performance trends in visual mode.
• Referrals provide a list of the affiliate’s referrals.
• Visits indicate the number of visits generated by each of the affiliate URLs.
• Creatives give them access to the brand assets you have uploaded, such as images or text links that they can publish on their website.
• Settings allow them to change their payment addresses, such as the email ID associated with their Paypal account.

AffiliateWP Referrals

Along with awarding an affiliate a commission for sales completed, AffiliateWP can also help you award your affiliates for any referrals.

This will allow them to earn money for activities such as lead generation and subscriptions. The referrals are counted generally when a new user signs up on your WordPress site.

AffiliateWP offers such referrals via three default settings, which you can choose when you add a new referral.

These are

• Sales
• Opt-ins
• Leads

You can see the referrals earned by each of your affiliates at the ‘Referrals’ tab of your dashboard.

You can choose to accept, reject, or edit a referral and make payments for your affiliates. In addition, you can also set up instructions for recurring referrals, such as monthly subscriptions.

Add-on Referrals

As AffiliateWP works hand-in-hand with several other prominent platforms, you can also install other third-party add-ons. This will enable your affiliates to earn commissions on referrals or purchases made on these platforms.

For instance, if you installed the ‘Signup Referral’ add-on, the affiliate will earn a commission every time the referred user registers as an affiliate. They will also earn points if the referral creates a user account via one of the integrated platforms such as WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads.

In other words, there is more than one way you can use AffiliateWP to encourage users to join your affiliate program. The more the incentive, the more promotion your products will receive.

AffiliateWP Add-ons & Extension

By itself, AffiliateWP is a decent plugin that can offer you all the essentials of an affiliate program. But what makes it totally unique is its selection of add-ons that provide a seamless workflow when combined with its core features.

These allow you to stretch the functionality of AffiliateWP even further. The plugin comes with three types of add-ons, which are available based on the subscription.

Official Free Add-ons

AffiliateWP includes a big box of free features to level up your affiliate game. As of now, the platform has 17 free add-ons that can provide a broad spectrum of additional capabilities for your WordPress site.

You can also find many more unofficial add-ons in the WordPress directory.

Using these, you can create new Affiliate Area tabs, provide ‘allow-own referrals’, provide affiliate coupons, and a lot more.

Pro Add-ons

These premium add-ons are available only for Professional and Ultimate license holders. Such add-ons elevate your affiliate program’s features, making it easy to set up lifetime commissions, activate recurring referrals, and perform larger payouts.

3rd-Party Add-ons

Apart from official built-in add-ons, you can also benefit from third-party integrations depending on your business needs.

These include tools such as cryptocurrency payments, newsletter subscriptions, social media sharing buttons, and so on.

However, keep in mind that these are supported by the respective developers, and as such, you will have to download and install them from their corresponding websites.

AffiliateWP will redirect you to the official 3rd party websites when you select an add-on.

AffiliateWP Features

AffiliateWP comes packed with features that will help you create an affiliate program from scratch and maintain it.

We have discussed how you can add affiliates, manage them, and offer payouts. That said, there are a few more features that make AffiliateWP a well-rounded plugin for your WordPress site.

Easy Installation

This plugin is easy to download and requires minimal effort from your side to get it up and running.

AffiliateWP will automatically allocate a page for your affiliates, and all you need to do is add any required customizations, if applicable.

Real-Time Reporting

All the activities from your affiliate links will be updated on yours and the affiliates’ dashboard in real-time. You can track the performance, as well as earnings, without any delay.

Customizable Emails

You can set up emails to get notified of any affiliate applications and new referrals. Additionally, you can also decide whether to send email notifications to your affiliates when their application is accepted or when their referrals make a purchase.

Developer-Friendly

AffiliateWP is exceptionally flexible with its customizable options. Developers will find its interface friendly enough to make any adjustments, and revamp the features to meet their requirements.

Export and Import Data

If you need to import your affiliates’ data for any accounting purposes, you can easily download a CSV file with their collective and individual earnings. Furthermore, you can also import affiliate data from other affiliate plugins.

Translation-Ready

AffiliateWP is fully internationalized and can be translated to your language with ease.

Reliable Customer Support

What’s more, to help you make the most of AffiliateWP, the team has created a thoroughly detailed set of documentation and tutorials that will guide you through each and every step.

The customer support team can be quickly reached through a contact form on their website.

AffiliateWP Pricing

AffiliateWP offers four different plans that are flexible to meet the needs of any growing business.

Personal Plan at $99 per year

• One site
• All core features
• Access to free add-ons

Plus Plan at $149 per year

• Three sites
• All core features
• Access to free add-ons

Professional Plan at $240 per year

• Unlimited sites
• All core features
• Access to both free and pro add ons

Ultimate Plan at $499 as a one-time payment

• Unlimited sites
• All core features
• Access to both free and pro add ons
• Lifetime access

All plans come with one year of plugin updates and email support, except the Ultimate plan, which offers unlimited access to updates. You can also choose to upgrade your licenses at any time.

AffiliateWP does not offer a trial period or a free plan. However, there is a 30-day full refund policy that you can take advantage of.

AffiliateWP Review – The Verdict

At Kooc Media, we have used AffiliateWP since it was very first launched and it has performed flawlessly on our eCommerce sites. The creator Pippin Williamson and his company Sandhill’s Devolvement have an an outstanding reputation within the WordPress community for creating great products and providing top quality support. We reviewed WP Simple Pay also which is by the same company and it’s another high quality product.

Affiliate programs are one of the most effective ways to outsource your marketing efforts. Before, it was challenging to develop your own affiliate program without consulting developers and other service providers.

AffiliateWP has changed the game by making affiliate programs accessible to all website owners. The plugin helps you create a referral in your own terms, right from your WordPress dashboard – regardless of your coding knowledge.

AffiliateWP truly shines with its set of integrations and add-ons that bring in much more versatility. The tool comes loaded with features that make affiliate programs simpler, not only for you – but also for your affiliates. With bulk payments and third-party tools, the plugin has covered every possible scenario that might be built into an affiliate program.

It has essentially broken down a complicated system and transitioned it into a simple process that you can efficiently manage by yourself. The only hard work here is that you will need to strategize your affiliate program first. Once you have the equation right, AffiliateWP can be an invaluable addition to your WordPress suite.

We are pleased to recommend this as the best affiliate plugin for WordPress websites.

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AffiliateWP

9

Features

9.0/10

Price

8.0/10

Support

10.0/10

Ease of Use

9.0/10

Design

9.0/10

Pros

• Lots of Features
• Easy to Use
• Extremely well made
• Excellent customer support
• Integrates with other plugins

Cons

• Not The Cheapest plugin
• Have to pay for addons seperately

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