Building a successful affiliate program requires a powerful and reliable tool. AffiliateWP is a popular affiliate management plugin that offers a wide range of integrations and works directly inside WordPress.
In this detailed review, we'll break down exactly what it offers, how it performs, and help you understand if it's the right tool to grow your business.
Table of Contents
- Setting Up AffiliateWP
- Core Features and WooCommerce Integration
- Managing Your WooCommerce Affiliates
- Fraud Detection with AffiliateWP
- AffiliateWP Pricing
- Customer Reviews and Feedback on AffiliateWP
- Final Thoughts on AffiliateWP
Setting Up AffiliateWP
Like most modern plugins, AffiliateWP uses a setup wizard to get your affiliate program running in just a few steps. The process starts upon activation and guides you first through activating your license key and then selecting your integrations.
Here, one of the first things you'll notice is the sheer number of available platforms. While powerful, this immediately highlights the plugin's broad scope, which extends far beyond just WooCommerce to include membership sites, form builders, and more.
After selecting WooCommerce, the wizard helps you configure your payout methods.
Next, you’ll set up your default commission structure and choose which advanced features to enable, provided they are available in your plan.
The final screen confirms your settings, and with a click, your affiliate program is live.
However, the setup process takes a questionable turn on the "Commissions and Growth Tools" screen. Here, you'll find a list of Growth Tools, which are actually other plugins from the same parent company, all of which are pre-checked for installation. In our view, this is a misleading tactic, and you'll need to be careful to uncheck these options if you don’t want to install a suite of unrelated software.
With the setup process complete, let's take a closer look at the plugin's core features.
Core Features and WooCommerce Integration
AffiliateWP offers a one-click WooCommerce integration and automatically tracks referrals right within your store.
Let's look at some of the specific features that make it a great choice for WooCommerce store owners.
Affiliate Coupon and Link Discounts
Beyond standard links, AffiliateWP lets you track affiliates using WooCommerce coupons.
Just create a coupon in WooCommerce and assign it to a specific affiliate. When a customer uses that code at checkout, the affiliate automatically gets credit for the sale. This is a great way for affiliates to promote your store with special discounts.
The Affiliate Link Discounts addon provides another great way for customers to buy through affiliate links. When a customer clicks an affiliate's referral link, a WooCommerce discount can be automatically applied to their cart. This immediate reward can boost conversion rates and make the affiliate's promotion even more appealing.
Flexible WooCommerce Commissions
AffiliateWP gives you a lot of control over how you pay commissions for WooCommerce sales.
You can set custom commission rates for individual products, which is perfect for offering higher payouts on high-margin items. This flexibility also extends to entire product categories or even specific product variations.
If you use WooCommerce Subscriptions, the Recurring Referrals addon lets you track and pay commissions on all ongoing subscription payments.
It also has a Lifetime Commissions addon, which lets you link a customer to an affiliate for life. This means the original referring affiliate will earn a commission on every future purchase that the customer makes, even if they visit your site directly later.
Beyond these, you also have the option to disable referrals for specific products that you don’t want included in your affiliate program.
Managing Your WooCommerce Affiliates
Once your program is set up, the next step is managing your partners. AffiliateWP provides different features to handle everything from sign-ups to payouts.
Registering and Approving Affiliates
AffiliateWP offers several ways to bring new affiliates into your program. Upon installation, it automatically creates a registration form, so potential partners can start signing up right away. You have full control over who joins. You can either manually approve each application or set it to approve new affiliates automatically.
For more direct control, you can add affiliates manually from the WordPress dashboard. You’re presented with a form that you can fill out to individually add each affiliate.
An affiliate is also a WordPress user, so you can even convert an existing WordPress user into an affiliate from the Edit User page.
If you want to onboard a large group at once, you can also convert all users with a specific role, like "Customer," into affiliates in just a few clicks. This is done on the Migration Assistant tab of AffiliateWP's Tools page.
Supporting WooCommerce Affiliates with AffiliateWP
Once an affiliate is on board, the next step is to give that affiliate as much motivation and support as possible. To support your partners, AffiliateWP lets you upload and organize promotional materials like banners and text links directly into the dashboard. Beyond creatives, it also lets you offer personalized affiliate landing pages, vanity coupon codes to help with promotions, and custom affiliate links.
Out of the box, it provides a dedicated dashboard for each partner. However, it offers two distinct options here:
- The Affiliate Area: This is the standard dashboard that integrates with your WordPress theme. It gives affiliates a clear overview of their referrals, visits, payouts, and performance stats.
- The Affiliate Portal: For those with a Professional license, this addon provides a modern, full-screen interface that is clean, responsive, and completely separate from your site’s theme.
The portal isn't quite polished as you see in Solid Affiliate, but it's certainly serviceable, and it's not going to cause any affiliates to go elsewhere.
Monitoring Your Affiliate Program
Keeping track of your program’s performance is key to its success, and AffiliateWP provides real-time reports to help you do just that.
From the main dashboard, you’ll get an overview with a quick snapshot of your program's health. This includes stats on unpaid referrals, recent visits, and top-performing affiliates, giving you a high-level look at your most important metrics.
For a deeper insight, you can explore detailed reports for Referrals, Affiliates, Visits, and Payouts. These sections allow you to see trends over time and manage individual records. All of this data can also be exported to a CSV file, which is useful for accounting or further analysis.
While the reports provide all the necessary information, their design is basic rather than innovative.
Payout Management
When it comes to payouts, AffiliateWP offers several flexible options. The Integrated Payouts Service is a unique feature, and it allows you to pay affiliates in over 50 countries directly from your bank account or credit card.
It also supports one-click PayPal Payouts for quick payments and allows you to process manual payouts via other methods like bank transfers. For WooCommerce users, you can also pay commissions in the form of store credit, which encourages affiliates to spend their earnings back in your shop.
Fraud Detection with AffiliateWP
Fraud presents a real threat to affiliate marketing programs. It can not only cost you money but also time and damage to your reputation.
As a general rule, hosted platforms offer more robust fraud detection than standalone WooCommerce plugins. But standalone plugins like AffiliateWP have also started adding fraud detection features.
It starts with the basics. By default, it lets you manually approve every new affiliate who applies. This gives you the chance to review their information before they join your program. To protect your registration and login forms from bots and spam, you can also enable CAPTCHA. AffiliateWP supports popular services like hCaptcha, reCAPTCHA, and Cloudflare Turnstile.
For more robust protection, it has a Fraud Prevention addon that adds various automated tools. It can automatically flag or even reject suspicious referrals based on rules that you set. For example, it can monitor for unusually high or low conversion rates and control whether affiliates are allowed to earn commissions on their own purchases. It even lets you verify that referral traffic is coming from an affiliate’s registered website.
AffiliateWP Pricing
AffiliateWP’s pricing structure is a bit complex. It ties specific features to each license tier, not just the number of sites you can use it on.
Here's a breakdown of the plans:
| Feature | Personal | Plus | Professional |
| Price | $149 / year | $199 / year | $299 / year |
| Renewal Price | $374 / year | $499 / year | $749 / year |
| Sites | 1 Site | 3 Sites | 10 Sites |
Customer Reviews and Feedback on AffiliateWP
To get a sense of what real users think, we looked at feedback from popular review platforms. Since AffiliateWP is a premium-only plugin, you won't find user reviews on the WordPress.org repository. However, it does have a presence on other sites.
On Trustpilot, the plugin has a 4.1 out of 5-star rating. This is based on a small number of reviews, which can sometimes make the average less reliable. Capterra provides a clearer picture, with a 4.6 out of 5 rating based on over 111 reviews.
Looking at the content of the reviews, the overall sentiment is positive. Users generally see it as a reliable and solid plugin. While it may not generate a lot of passionate praise, it also doesn't attract many significant complaints, suggesting it consistently gets the job done for most users.
Final Thoughts on AffiliateWP
AffiliateWP isn't just a WooCommerce affiliate plugin; it's a complete affiliate management system for your entire WordPress ecosystem. It offers a lot of integrations, making it a great choice for complex sites that use a mix of eCommerce, membership, and form plugins.
Its WooCommerce integration is also quite comprehensive. You get granular commission rules for specific products, categories, and even recurring subscriptions.
However, if your needs are focused, you can use Solid Affiliate, which is a more modern plugin exclusively built for WooCommerce.
AffiliateWP Review - Frequently Asked Questions
1. Does WooCommerce have an affiliate program?
WooCommerce does not come with a built-in affiliate program. To run one, you need to install a dedicated affiliate plugin. These plugins integrate with your store to track referrals from your partners, manage commissions, and handle payouts, giving you a complete system within your WordPress dashboard.
2. What is the best affiliate plugin for WooCommerce?
Solid Affiliate is our top recommendation for WooCommerce stores. It is built exclusively for WooCommerce and offers deep integration, a modern and user-friendly interface, and all the powerful features you need to run a successful program without any add-ons.
3. Is WooCommerce better than Shopify?
Both are powerful platforms; WooCommerce's main advantage is its flexibility and ownership. As it's an open-source platform on WordPress, you have complete control over your store's design, data, and functionality. Shopify offers simplicity, but this comes in exchange for less control and potential restrictions. Read our Shopify vs WooCommerce comparison for more details.
4. Why does every WooCommerce store need an affiliate program?
An affiliate program is a powerful and cost-effective marketing channel. It allows you to engage your happy customers and other content creators to promote your products. You only pay when a sale is made, which makes it a low-risk, high-reward way to drive new traffic and sales.
