A well structured and credible affiliate/referral sales program can transform your eCommerce store.
If you’re a small eCommerce operation looking to grow your sales, you must give serious consideration to operating an affiliate program. Think of affiliates as your own private army of sales people who have the potential to send you thousands of new customers much faster than you can. Good affiliates are just like good salespeople. That’s because they are salespeople. A lot of us suck at sales, copyrighting and marketing in general. Good affiliates have mastered the dark arts of convincing customers to part with their cash online.
While there are lots of big services for selling one off digital products that have robust affiliate features built in (like eJunkie, DPD et al), the core of WooCommerce doesn’t provide us with any features for managing an affiliate program. Thankfully there some excellent plugins which do exactly that. Today we’ll focus on one in particular we really like.
AffiliateWP
AffiliateWP is the brainchild of two of the smartest WordPress developers on the planet, Pippin Williamson and Andrew Munro, so you know it’s gonna be good 🙂
This is a commercial plugin that extends WordPress into a fully functional Affiliate Sales Management platform. The super news is that AffiliateWP is tightly integrated with WooCommerce.
So now you as the merchant can operate an Affiliate program directly inside WordPress and do the following:
- Moderate and manage affiliate applications – you can allow people to apply to become affiliates and review and approve each application.
- Manage affiliate commission rates – each affiliate can have their own rates.
- Deep integration into WooCommerce – orders in WooCommerce are automatically tracked back to an affiliates referral link.
- Affiliate coupon tracking – you can provide affiliates with unique coupon codes and define the type of incentive these coupon codes provide (e.g. % discount or nominal discount, free shipping etc.)
- When an affiliate sale is placed via WooCommerce a note is automatically added to the order in WooCommerce to allow merchants to see at a glance if the sale was referred by an affiliate.
Prices for the plugin start at $49 for 1 site and 12 months of updates and support. Learn more about AffiliateWP pricing.
