Best WooCommerce Affiliate Plugins For 2023 : I Tested them all

I’ve tried every WooCommerce affiliate plugin available, and while most seem to offer more or less the same features at first glance, there are some important nuanced differences between them.
For example, some of them aren’t built specifically for WooCommerce, which impacts the user experience, and some support edge cases better than others. In addition, the pricing model can significantly impact scalability and lock key features necessary to run a functional affiliate program.
Below, I’ll introduce you to the various WooCommerce affiliate plugins available and then walk you through the differences between each one.

Most WooCommerce affiliate plugins offer the same commoditized features necessary to run a functional affiliate program, and Solid Affiliate offers all of these at its most basic pricing tier. Here are just a few of these features:

• Affiliate Link Tracking: Provide links to specific affiliates to track sales and pay commissions.
• Affiliate Coupon Tracking: Provide custom coupons to affiliates to track sales and pay commissions .
• Affiliate Portal: A personalized portal for each affiliate to manage sales and payments.
• Email Notifications: Provides automated emails for new affiliate signups and when they’ve brought commissions.
• Creatives: Easily share marketing assets with affiliates, like banner ads and promotional videos.
• Advanced Reports: Statistics on your affiliate program’s performance so you can level up your future campaigns.
• Commission Rate Configuration: Set custom commission rates based on different factors (the affiliate, the product/service, subscription vs. non-subscription, etc.).
• Affiliate Management: Approve or reject affiliate applications and view all affiliate activity in one place.

In addition to the features above, I wanted to make Solid Affiliate an even better plugin for WooCommerce stores built on WordPress websites.
To do so, here are a few key differentiators between Solid Affiliate and other affiliate plugins:

1. Includes all table stakes features. Some of the plugins mentioned below technically offer all of the features necessary to run an affiliate program, though you’d have to purchase a higher pricing tier to make it a functional program.
2. Deep integrations with WordPress and WooCommerce. Solid Affiliate was built specifically for WooCommerce stores built on WordPress, while most other competitors only offer an integration – not a native WordPress plugin.
3. Setup is super easy and requires zero technical knowledge. Given that Solid Affiliate is built specifically for WooCommerce store owners, it has one super simple setup wizard that makes it possible to get set up in less than five minutes.
4. One low price point designed for scalability. You’ll only pay one low price to get unlimited affiliates, unlimited tracked referrals, and unlimited commission payouts.

I’ll discuss these key differentiators at length below, though first I’ll give you a detailed walkthrough of Solid Affiliate in action.

Getting Started with Solid Affiliate

Step 1: Install and Set it Up in a Matter of Minutes

If you’re using the WooCommerce integration, Solid Affiliate will automatically detect that WooCommerce is up and running on your website, so you can skip to the next step. Otherwise, you can use the simple four-step setup wizard to get Solid Affiliate up and running in minutes. Doing so requires just a few clicks, so you don’t need any technical expertise.
Here’s what the setup process looks like:

1. Confirm that WooCommerce is activated (all you have to do is click “Activate” on the WordPress plugin)
2. Configure outgoing email settings (simply add a name and email)
3. Paste the License Key (you receive this with your purchase of Solid Affiliate)
4. Click “Create Affiliate Portal Page” (you can change the URL if you wish)

That’s it! Solid Affiliate is now activated on your website!

Step 2: Affiliates Submit an Application

The next step is adding the affiliate signup page to your website. This is where people can fill out a registration form and apply to become an affiliate. Once accepted, they can use this same page to log into their account.

Step 3: Approve Applicants

Once a potential affiliate submits an application, you will receive an email notification. By clicking the link in the email, you’ll be taken to the WordPress dashboard and can accept or reject the pending affiliate notification in the Solid Affiliate plugin.
Once the applicant is approved, they’ll be able to manage all of their referrals in one place. Specifically, they’ll be able to see:

• Referrals: The amount earned, source, payment status, and date
• Visits: The referring page the visitor came from and landing page they purchased on
• Payouts: The date paid, amount, and status (paid/not paid)
• Coupons: If this person has a coupon for their account, this section will show the coupon code, type, and number of referrals
• Creatives: Affiliates can access the creatives for various offers and install them on their website with one click
• Account Settings: They can select the payment email

Now that your affiliate program is up and running let’s break down how you can manage it in Solid Affiliate.

Tracking Referral Orders

Start by looking at the “Manage Referrals” dashboard, which displays every referral purchase and specific details like:

• The Referral number
• The affiliate’s name, ID, and email address
• The order amount
• The commission amount
• The referral source (e.g., “Coupon #110”)

This makes it easy to track all of your referrals in one place and you can also drill down to any specific referral and view how the commission was calculated.

Managing Commissions For Your Affiliate Program

One of the key benefits of Solid Affiliate is that it offers many different customization options, and we’re always adding more according to customer requests. So here’s a list of all your commission options.

Global Defaults

Global Defaults enables you to set a default commission rate and recurring referral commission rate for all of your products. So unless you adjust one of the settings I’ll discuss below, this is the referral rate that all of your affiliates will receive for all of your products.
If you decide to change the commission rate, you can always do so by simply clicking “edit.”

Affiliate Specific Commission Rates

If you decide to offer a different commission rate for a specific affiliate, you can set that rate for that particular affiliate in this tab. Simply add their email and then set the commission rate, and that affiliate will automatically receive the custom commission rate for all referrals.

Product Specific Commission Rate

If you want to assign a different commission rate to a particular product, this feature enables you to do so. You can also choose to disable referral commissions for a specific product.

Product Category Specific Commission Rate

This setting is the same as the Product Specific commission rate, though instead of setting a different commission rate for an individual product, you can set a different rate for an entire product category.

Active Affiliate Coupons

In this setting, you’ll see all the coupons you’ve assigned to affiliates. For example, if you’ve assigned the coupon code “50-dollars-off” to john@example.com, then every time a customer enters that coupon code, John receives the affiliate commission.

Pay Your Affiliates

Solid Affiliate enables you to pay all your affiliates in three simple steps.
First, filter by referrals you want to pay. The default setting pays affiliates for referrals older than 30 days. This way, if one of the referrals requests a refund, you won’t have already paid the affiliate for the purchase.
However, you can also choose the second setting, which immediately pays all of your affiliates.
Finally, if you prefer to set your own custom date range, you can also do that.
Next, you’ll select a payment method. Solid Affiliate enables you to make a manual payout by exporting a CSV of the payout data, or you can choose to use the automatic PayPal bulk payout.
If you choose the PayPal bulk payout method, click the “Preview Bulk Payout” button and you can make sure everything looks right before initiating the payout.
Solid Affiliate also offers a list of all the bulk payouts you’ve ever made, and you can click the PayPal link to see the transaction inside PayPal.

Refund Protection

It’s not uncommon for a referral to purchase a product and later request a refund, so it’s important to set up your affiliate program to only pay affiliates after the refund period expires.
Solid Affiliate makes this super easy.
First, it automatically rejects unpaid referrals, so you never have to worry about paying affiliates for refunded products.
In addition, you can go to settings and establish a grace period. For example, if you have a 14 day refund period, you can adjust the settings to only issue payouts for products purchased more than 14 days ago.
Ready to jump in and start making more sales through affiliate marketing? Get started with Solid Affiliate today, and if you aren’t 100% satisfied, you have 30 days to get your money back.

Why Choose Solid Affiliate?

I wholeheartedly believe that Solid Affiliate is the best affiliate product available. While there are other products available that offer similar functionalities, here are a few key differentiators that make Solid Affiliate unique.

Here are just a few of the features embedded in the Solid Affiliate product that many other plug-ins require you to purchase as add-ons:

• Unlimited everything (referrals, affiliates, creatives, etc.)
• Full support for recurring referrals with WooCommerce Subscriptions
• Commission Insights (see how commissions are calculated)
• Pro Affiliate Portal for your affiliates to track their referrals
• A PayPal payouts integration (bulk pay affiliates, establish a refund grace period, and auto reject refunded referrals)

Many affiliate solutions offer a WordPress integration but not a native WordPress plugin. In addition, they are often built for various ecommerce platforms.
Solid Affiliate takes a different approach.
First, it’s a native WordPress plugin. This means:

• It’s super easy to get it up and running (there’s just one simple wizard to get you set up in just a few clicks).
• You can manage everything directly inside WordPress rather than logging into a separate platform.
• You can customize anything as developers can extend the existing code.

In addition, Solid Affiliate focuses purely on being a WooCommerce plugin. Here are a few key benefits of this specialization:

• It supports WooCommerce Subscriptions, meaning you don’t have to purchase any add-ons to get it up and running.
• Solid Affiliate knows every individual item that’s part of the purchase and accurately calculates commissions accordingly. This means that payments are always highly accurate.

To sum it up, designing a native WordPress plugin makes it easier for you to manage your affiliate program and ultimately saves you time and money.

I wanted to make it super easy for anyone to get Solid Affiliate up and running in minutes. Therefore, our set-up wizard walks you through a five-step process that anyone can complete in minutes (if not seconds!):

• Step 1: Install WooCommerce.
• Step 2: Install WooCommerce Subscriptions (optional).
• Step 3: Choose your outgoing email address and name.
• Step 4: Enter your license key.
• Step 5: One-click Affiliate Portal setup.
• Done!

Many other affiliate solutions limit the affiliates, tracked referrals, commission payouts, and other variables by price point.
Instead, Solid Affiliate offers unlimited affiliates, referrals, and creatives at a single low price point.
So whether you have 10 affiliates or 10,000 affiliates, you’ll still pay the same price.
To see for yourself how Solid Affiliate works, sign up today! We offer a 30 day money-back guarantee if you aren’t 100% satisfied, but we’re pretty sure you’re going to love it 🙂

AffiliateWP is another established affiliate plugin that many ecommerce marketers use to manage their affiliate programs. It’s natively integrated with WordPress, and you can also leverage its integrations with WooCommerce, WP Forms, PayPal, and more.
Here are just a few of its key features:

• Create affiliate links and landing pages
• Direct link tracking
• An affiliate portal (for the $299/year plan)
• PayPal payouts (for the $299/year plan)

It also offers Smart Commission Rules, including:

• Affiliate-specific commission rates
• Flat fee or % of total order
• Tiered affiliate rates
• Lifetime commissions

To pay your affiliates, you can use AffiliateWP’s One Click payouts feature, which will pay affiliates directly to their bank account.
While AffiliateWP is one of the most well-known plugins for WordPress sites, it still has a few drawbacks.
First, completing some tasks isn’t particularly user-friendly. For example, if you want to adjust commission rates, you’ll juggle between six different places in the plugin; affiliate profiles, WooCommerce coupon pages, WooCommerce product pages, and multiple disparate settings pages.
Another issue is that AffiliateWP doesn’t offer some of the basic features you need to run an affiliate program in its entry-level pricing tier.
For example, initiating PayPal payouts and offering an affiliate portal requires you to upgrade to their $299/per year plan.
Finally, AffiliateWP doesn’t spell out how commission rates are calculated. This is an issue because if you change a commission rate after an order is placed, you can’t change it.

Easy Affiliate (previously AffiliateRoyale) is a WordPress affiliate plugin similar to AffiliateWP. It prices based on a subscription pricing model and offers everything you might expect from an affiliate software.
Here are its core features:

• Affiliate Dashboard: Affiliates can monitor their sales, access links and banners, and track payments.
• Payment Integrations: Users can track initial and recurring payments.
• Fraud Protection: It flags and rejects suspicious activity before you pay affiliates.
• Creative Management: You can store creative materials, like banners, inside the platform.
• Custom Link Generation: Create legible referral links and custom shortcodes for your affiliates.
• Email Marketing: Send automated email campaigns to affiliates through MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, and ConvertKit

SUMO Affiliate is a popular affiliate plugin on CodeCanyon, and it offers the basics you need to create your own affiliate program.
When you log into the dashboard, you’ll see that it offers all of the following tabs:

• Affiliate
• Referrals
• Visits
• Creatives
• Payouts
• Reports
• Compatible Plugins
• Notifications

SUMO Affiliate also integrates with other WooCommerce offerings like WooCommerce Subscriptions and Recover Abandoned Cart, along with other marketing tools like WP Forms and Contact Form 7.
The drawback with SUMO Affiliate Pro and other plugins through CodeCanyon is that they require a little more technical expertise to get up and running.

Ultimate Affiliate Pro is another plugin designed specifically for WooCommerce and available through CodeCanyon. You’ll have access to all the basic features you need to sign up affiliate partners, establish payout percentages for various products, and pay your affiliates through PayPal or Stripe.
You can also offer performance bonuses for top affiliates, lifetime commissions, and create custom amounts for different affiliates.
In addition, Ultimate Affiliate Pro integrates with Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, Constant Contact, and other email marketing tools.
To help your affiliates get the word out about your offer, Ultimate Affiliate Pro integrates with Social Share & Locker so that partners can quickly share your offer across various social media platforms.

Post Affiliate Pro lets manage your entire affiliate marketing program in one dashboard. So if you’re managing multiple affiliate channels, it might be a good option, though it isn’t a native WordPress affiliate plugin.
The product is broken down into three main sections:

• Affiliate Tracking
• Affiliate Marketing
• Affiliate Management

Inside the dashboard, you’ll be able to manage commissions and payouts, campaign performance, and affiliate statistics.
It also offers other features like geotargeting, affiliate link styles, and real-time tracking, and fraud protection.
While it might be a good product for some scenarios, it does have some drawbacks. For example, it limits monthly tracking requests, and it’s not a native WordPress integration. In addition, your data is stored on Post Affiliate Pro’s servers, meaning it isn’t private.

Tapfiliate is another affiliate platform for ecommerce and SaaS businesses. It offers all of the basic options you might expect from an affiliate platform, such as:

• Various commission options: One-time or recurring commissions and fixed or percentage-based commission options.
• Beautiful tracking links: Create custom tracking links that are legible.
• Manage creatives in one place: The Tapfiliate platform lets you store banners, posts, and emails in one place.

You can also offer performance-based bonuses and create different affiliate tiers to further motivate affiliates to drive business.
Another bonus to Tapfiliate is that it offers a REST API so that users can build their own custom workflows.
Tapfiliate works with WooCommerce, though it wasn’t built specifically for the platform. In fact, it also offers solutions for influencer and referral marketing programs, so it might be too much if you just need a simple WooCommerce affiliate solution.

ReferralCandy works with WooCommerce, though it is a full-fledged referral marketing solution rather than an affiliate plugin dedicated to WooCommerce.
So if you just want a solution that makes it easy to turn customers into advocates, it could be a good solution.
Here are its main features:

1. Send Automated Invitations: Once customers make a purchase, you can send an automated email invitation to promote your products or services.
2. Set Custom Rewards: Create coupons, cash, and custom rewards for referring customers.
3. Promote Your Program: Create pop-ups and other referral widgets to invite people to sign up for your referral program.

ReferralCandy offers a pay-for-performance pricing model, so rather than charging a set price, it takes a commission on new sales.
A few other helpful features it offers include fraud protection against suspicious transactions, a simple analytics dashboard, and various integrations (including WooCommerce).

Selecting The Best WooCommerce Affiliate Plugin For Your Needs

There are several different WooCommerce affiliate plugins available, though I built Solid Affiliate because I couldn’t find a single solution that worked consistently and could accommodate edge cases.
In contrast, Solid Affiliate is built specifically for WooCommerce and with modern development practices, it’s a dependable solution that is easy to use and just works.
I’ve also spent the past several years building various commonly requested features into the platform so that it fits just about anyone’s needs.
To see for yourself if Solid Affiliate is right for you, sign up today risk free!