Affiliate marketing is a popular way of boosting sales and growing the customer base of any business. But, it isn’t easy to setup. Worse still, hard to find the right tools to run and manage your affiliate system.
Thankfully, ecommerce sites hosted on WordPress have a plethora of plugins to handle the entire process. This guide takes a look at the best ten plugins in the field.
Contents
- 1 How Affiliate Marketing Helps eCommerce Companies
- 2 The Best WordPress Affiliate Plugins
- 3 Conclusion
How Affiliate Marketing Helps eCommerce Companies
Affiliate marketing is a major source of income for both ecommerce companies and their customers.
As an ecommerce company, you can set up an affiliate program that allows customers to get links and advertise your products. When someone uses a customer’s link to come to your site and make a purchase, the customer gets paid.
According to data, 81 percent of brands and publishers use affiliate marketing to drive traffic and improve sales. Mediakix also reported that there is a 10.1 percent surge in affiliate marketing spending every year. That means that in 2020, the number should reach $6.8 billion.
Why is affiliate marketing so successful? Affiliate marketing is successful because it provides tremendous benefits to both parties. Members get passive income and a chance to improve their revenues, while the business owner increases its sales.
The problem with managing an affiliate program, however, is that it can be arduous. You need to determine commission rates, create and paste links, monitor the campaign’s progress.
Setting all these parameters up and managing them are the problems affiliate plugins solve. They manage every single detail concerning your marketing campaign, allowing you to automate and tremendously increase traffic and sales on your platform.
So, let’s dive into the top plugins available for WordPress sites:
The Best WordPress Affiliate Plugins
1. AffiliateWP
AffiliateWP claims to be the best affiliate management system plugin for WordPress. This plugin allows you to set up and run a complete affiliate system from WordPress. With AffiliateWP, you can award affiliates commission for sales completed, leads generation, and subscriptions. It also includes several features, including payments, referrals, third-party solutions, and more, right from your site’s dashboard.
Through AffiliateWP, signing up new affiliates is a breeze. The plugin features a manual and automated process of signing new partners to your program. Adding affiliates manually could be laborious for larger sites with lots of visibility. Furthermore, you can set affiliate commissions as a percentage or a flat rate, and you can do this individually for each affiliate or set a global rate for your partners.
AffiliateWP features advanced solutions such as developer tools, integrated management, and network control. The tool allows you to set up affiliate payment schemes based on your specifications. It also improves convenience with affiliate tracking and management since it gives you control over the affiliate program’s different aspects.
The plugin has a set of easy-to-use features such as unlimited assets creation, affiliate coupon tracking, referral rate types, link generator, and others. AffiliateWP allows you to view and edit affiliate accounts easily. This affiliate plugin adds the ability for you to view end-to-end activities and events.
AffiliateWP comes with popular payment methods for remitting earnings to your affiliates, including bank transfers and a PayPal add-on. You can also generate a CSV file with your affiliate details and their unpaid earnings.
Lastly, you can use AffiliateWP’s hooks and templates to come up with custom features and functionalities. If you want to integrate the tool with your services and systems, you merely have to get its API, and you’re ready.
AffiliateWP Pricing
- Personal Plan: Costs $99 per year and can be used on one website. It includes both all of AffilateWP’s core features and 15 official add-ons
- Plus Plan: Costs $149 per year and can be used on three websites. It consists of all add-ons and core features.
- Professional Plan: Costs $249 per year can be used on unlimited websites. It also comes with core features and both Free and Pro add-ons.
- Ultimate Plan: Costs $499 a year. It includes everything you get with the professional plan along with lifetime access.
2. Post Affiliate Pro
This is a powerful plugin for large online stores that need to manage and monitor their affiliate network.
Post Affiliate Pro is fast, intuitive, and useful, providing solutions to all of your needs for a successful campaign. Post Affiliate Pro has several methods of tracking – Javascript, flash cookies, and IP tracking.
The tool also has an automatic tracking feature that uses third-party cookies, so you will be able to host your affiliate system hosted on one website while promoting your products on others. Support for multiple currencies is also available, so you can pay your marketers in their local currencies based on how much sales they make.
for tracking affiliate
programs & networks
Another impressive feature is support for multiple-tiered marketing, which allows you to track and pay affiliates on certain levels. If you’re running a multi-level marketing network, this makes things simpler and structured. You can also track and reward affiliates that participate in a certain sale, track CPA commissions, recurring and group commissions, and more.
Getting affiliates to work tirelessly and send business your way is a tough ask without attractive assets. Post Affiliate Pro offers a ton of exciting promotional tools such as text link banners, peel banners, image banners, HTML banners, coupon banners and zip banners.
Post Affiliate Pro offers fraud protection, which improves your network’s security against fraud. The feature monitors all transactions that your system generates and declines any suspected fraudulent ones without sending you any pesky pop-ups.
Post Affiliates Pro Pricing
This plugin has three pricing tiers:
- The Pro Plan: Costs $97 per month. The plan includes several features, including one million tracking requests per month, optimal tracking, round-the-clock support, and free lifetime updates
- The Ultimate Plan: Costs $197 per month. It comes with five million tracking requests per month, unlimited affiliates, and SEO-friendly tools.
- The Network Plan: Costs $477 per month. It includes 20 million tracking requests monthly, an unlimited number of merchants, and an onboarding consultation service.
3. Affiliates Manager
This is another tool that allows you to run your affiliate marketing campaign easily. You can easily set up, manage, track traffic and report on sales driven to your site with this plugin. It integrates with popular ecommerce solutions such as WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads and Mailchimp Autoresponder for your email marketing efforts.
Affiliates Manager comes with several features. Real-time reporting allows it to track your affiliate’s traffic and sales, and it records them as soon as they happen. You can also decide if you want to reward your affiliates with a flat-rate payment or a percentage of every sale.
If you need to make manual adjustments to payouts, Affiliates Manager simplifies this process. The plugin also integrates with PayPal’s Mass Pay so that you can pay all your affiliates at once.
Affiliate registration is also customizable, as you can decide on how much or how little data you want to collect from them when they sign up. If you wish, you can mark specific fields as “required” or “optional.”
Affiliates Manager Pricing
This plugin comes with three pricing tiers:
- Free Plan: The plan doesn’t cost you anything. It gives you a WordPress-compatible plugin with access to detailed tutorials and community support.
- Single-Site Plan: The plan costs $39, and it covers just one site. You get everything with the free plan with round-the-clock technical support and a support forum.
- Developer License: A developer license costs $97. It comes with all top features, including access to an unlimited number of sites.
4. Thirsty Affiliates
Thirsty Affiliates is a plugin for affiliates themselves to use which provides the ability to hide all long and pesky links through simple redirects. This plugin is a lightweight solution that allows for the integration of sales links into blog posts and comments. Using this affiliate management plugin is bound to supercharge your affiliate marketing efforts.
Thirsty Affiliate is simple to use a plugin that provides online stores with a system to manage their affiliate links. This can be done through safe redirects, adding images to affiliate links and its link tracking reports. Online store owners can even insert links automatically based on keywords used on a post.
Reports on Thirsty Affiliates come in both tables and charts, and they’re all easy to read.
Another impressive feature is the frontend link fixer, which makes updates to links whenever you update them. This way, all links remain active. Country targeting and geo-location links will help you provide alternate destinations for international links, and integration with Google Analytics enables you to get details on your campaign’s performance in real-time.
Thirsty Affiliates Pricing
Thirsty Affiliates has three pricing plans — there’s a 1-site license that costs $49 per year, a 5-site license for $99 per year, and a 10-site license for $149 per year. All plans come with a 14-day refund guarantee.
5. Ultimate Affiliate Pro
Ultimate Affiliate Pro is a premium plugin that has shown enough to be included in the top-shelf of the WordPress affiliate plugins list. This solution allows you to turn your website into a money-generation machine.
Some of the main features of Ultimate Affiliate Pro include PayPal payouts, total affiliate marketing toolset, social share, banner ads management, email notifications and more.
Ultimate Affiliate Pro features a multi-level marketing strategy that allows each of your affiliates to create their marketing campaigns and bring in more affiliates. Affiliates can set the horizontal or vertical menu on their pages, and they can customize different sections — from “Marketing” to “Profile” to “Reports.”
There is no limit to the number of affiliates that you can signup with this plugin. Ultimate Affiliate Pro is compatible with top email marketing platforms, including Mailchimp, MailPoet, and more. The plugin’s Social Share & Locker integration also provides a “Share” button for affiliates to share their links across social media easily.
Another impressive feature is the ability to classify affiliates based on their performance. Each rank can have its commission level, and you can set requirements for each affiliate to get promoted to the next rank.
However, note that you will only be able to pay affiliates in the United States using PayPal and Stripe.
Ultimate Affiliate Pro Pricing
- For Ultimate Affiliate Pro, you pay a one-time fee of $59 for a lifetime license. The version comes with support for the latest WordPress version and six months’ worth of support.
6. YITH WooCommerce Affiliates
Developed by YIThemes, this is a perfect addition to any optimized ecommerce website ready to make sales. The plugin focuses on ensuring visibility, and it has some exciting features.
YITH WooCommerce Affiliates is a powerful plugin. You can make set a rule that triggers automatic commission payments on specific days of the month. Create a trigger that stores information for specific visits from each affiliate’s link, set a different commission rate per product, create an affiliate history for new visits, set plugin’s language to translate based on the affiliate’s location easily.
The plugin also has an automatic authorization feature that helps it approve affiliates immediately, so you don’t have to worry about checking every applicant interested in partnering with your company. The entire process is automatic and easy, and you don’t have to do a thing. One area where YITH trumps its competitors has to be customer service. The plugin’s developers are notorious for treating customer’s queries with speed, including those that might not be included in the plugin.
YITH WooCommerce Affiliates Pricing
This plugin has three price plans. The single-site plan costs $118.18, while the six-site and 30-site licenses cost $331.75 and $533.17, respectively.
Visit Yith WooCommerce Affiliates
7. ReferralCandy for WooCommerce
Developed by ReferralCandy, this plugin scores one of the top marks for simplicity. From the setup process to its usability, the plugin is straightforward to use. You practically don’t even need any developer to help to set it up.
ReferralCandy for WooCommerce provides one of the best templates of any affiliate plugin. The templates work almost like landing pages, although they’re smaller and more optimized for posting referrals. They’re mobile-friendly, and you can seamlessly plug them into your website.
Developers can take advantage of CSS and HTML editing to edit the templates as they like. You’ll also love the multi-channel promotion tools available on this plugin. While most referral services give you tools to make a referral platform, ReferralCandy comes with an entire promotional suite.
First, you get a module that helps you send email blasts. The module makes everyone on your ecommerce email list a part of the referral program; then, it sends emails notifying them. So, everyone can go to your website and get a link to share.
Also, the mails don’t stop there. ReferralCandy generates links for everyone who purchases on your site, so no one gets left out of the program.
As expected, the usuals are all taken care of on ReferralCandy. You can track engagements and referrals, customize payments for people, and more.
ReferralCandy for WooCommerce Pricing
Unfortunately, there’s no free plan on ReferralCandy. However, there’s a 30-day free trial for you to check what it offers and to decide if you want to continue paying for this plugin.
The base fee goes for $49 monthly. You also get a monthly ReferralCandy commission. While the commission stars at 5 percent, it drops as your website grows and sales surge.
For your first $1,000 referral sales, you get a 5 percent commission.
For the next $10,000 in sales, you get a 3.5 percent commission.
For the next $100,000, you get a 1.5 percent commission.
For everything over that, you get a 0.25 percent commission.
The Enterprise Plan
For the Enterprise Plan, you will have to contact ReferralCandy. The minimum rate available on the website is $3,999 monthly. This plan won’t make any commissions.
8. Affiliate Royale
Affiliate Royale is a user-friendly plugin designed to provide specific details on your marketing efforts, including online and offline sales tracking capabilities.
With Affiliate Royale, each of your affiliates gets dedicated login pages, and dashboards. The plugin’s dashboard provides affiliates with full details for tracking and managing their earnings, marketing efforts and referral histories.
Site owners also get an intuitive admin panel that provides an overview of the site’s marketing health. From statistics, payouts to affiliates’ activities, you can check everything. Affiliate Royale also gives you detailed reports of activities and more periodically.
Affiliate Royale also offers the flexibility to customize specific details like messages, payouts, and commission levels. Control seems to be one of the plugin’s primary focuses. For more comfortable operation, some of the integrations available with the plugin include PayPal, Cart66, MemberPress, Mailchimp, and more.
Affiliate Royale Pricing
There are no monthly, annual, or transaction fees on Affiliate Royale. The pricing tiers include:
- Merchant Edition: The plan costs $85, and it’s only available for one site.
- Developer Edition: This plan costs $165. It covers an unlimited number of websites, as well as all features of the Merchant Edition.
All payments are a one-time fee.
9. Amazon Auto Links
Amazon Auto Links is a free WordPress plugin that focuses primarily on the Amazon Associates affiliate program. It’s the only free service on our list, although it does have some limitations. This plugin is a dumbed-down version of the Amazon Affiliate area, but it makes the process of searching for links easier for affiliates.
With Auto Links, you can easily insert Amazon products into your WordPress site. The plugin is compatible with the latest version of Amazon Product Advertising’s API, which is a sigh of relief for non-coding Amazon affiliates.
Auto Links allows you to either insert specific products you choose or do so automatically. With the latter choice, the plugin displays a regularly updated feed of products in different categories.
You can display products in four ways; product search, category, item look-up, and URL. Finally, the plugin supports all various Amazon locales. Did we mention that it’s free?
10. Affiliates Pro
Developed by Kento and itthinx, Affiliates is a full-feature affiliate WordPress plugin that works right out of the box. It comes with tools that are great for sellers, membership sites, and ecommerce stores.
Affiliates have an easy process for adding marketers to your program. The plugin is available for any ecommerce store, and it has a plethora of integrations waiting to run immediately.
This plugin features an intuitive dashboard, an automated affiliate registration process, and unlimited affiliate management sections. Commissions on the service are built-in, although you can always change them as you like. Affiliates allow you to track an infinite number of marketers on your network, and it offers traffic statistics that help you monitor what/who is working and what isn’t.
The plugin is also easy to customize, and it comes with its dedicated API. So, store administrators with a coding background can build customized affiliate management programs without having to do much heavy lifting. As with Amazon Auto Links, Affiliates is also free to use.
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing is a necessity for any ecommerce store that wants to bolster its revenues. However, the process of managing an affiliate marketing campaign can be labor and time-intensive.
With affiliate WordPress plugins, ecommerce websites hosted on the platform can better conduct the task. Any of the options listed above will be ideal for you.
