Welcome to my review blog post on Solid Affiliate.
Do you want to set up an affiliate program on WordPress for your WooCommerce store?
If so, you may have come across the Solid Affiliate plugin.
Solid Affiliate is an affiliate management plugin for WordPress that helps you set up an affiliate program for your WooCommerce store.
With this, you can build, manage, and track your affiliate program within WordPress.
If you are in a dilemma about whether to choose Solid Affiliate or not, stay tuned till the end of the post as we review all its features with pros and cons.
By the end, you will get to know if Solid Affiliate is the right choice or not.
What do we like about Solid Affiliate?
- It integrates well with WooCommerce and the WooCommerce subscriptions add-on.
- Its setup wizard guides you through the entire process of setting up. This would be really helpful for beginners.
- There are no additional addons you need to purchase to access its affiliate features, unlike Affiliate WP which charges an additional fee on its addons.
- With its affiliate group feature, you can categorize the affiliates based on their performance and reward the top affiliates with higher commissions motivating them to sell more.
- You can prioritize the commission rates you set with the commission rate overrides feature.
- It integrates with PayPal bulk payout to pay all affiliates in bulk.
- Its reporting feature gives visual charts to analyze the data. You can analyze the data of affiliates, referrals, payouts, and visits each in separate tabs.
What we don’t like about Solid Affiliate?
- Solid Affiliate only has MailChimp and PayPal integrations as of writing this post.
- It lacks its native coupons feature, so you need to use the WooCommerce coupons.
- You cannot automate the affiliate tasks. For example, you cannot add affiliates for groups in bulk. You need to do it manually.
- It doesn’t support cookieless affiliate tracking. If your browser clears all the cookies, you will end up losing revenue.
- Solid Affiliate as of now only supports last-click attribution. But they are working on releasing other click attributions soon.
Setup and installation
When you install and activate the Solid Affiliate plugin, you will see a setup wizard that guides you through the complete process of setting up the plugin.
Here you will activate WooCommerce, email settings, license key, and affiliate portal setup.
Solid Affiliate sits on top of Woocommerce.
Unlike other affiliate plugins like AffiliateWP which require additional add-ons to integrate with WooCommerce features, Solid Affiliate doesn’t require any additional add-ons to install. It comes with all the features packed into it.
Once the initial setup is done, you are good to proceed, start and manage your affiliate program.
Solid Affiliate – Settings
General settings
In the general settings tab, you can configure referrals and affiliate group settings.
Referral rate settings: Set the referral type as percentage or flat. Enter the referral rate to pay as affiliate commission.
Other referral settings: Here you can set the referral variable, cookie expiration period, referral grace period, exclude the shipping cost and taxes for calculating the payouts, and much more.
As you see in the screenshot, Solid Affiliate as of now only has last-click attribution. They are working on rolling out first click attribution and it will come soon.
Affiliate groups settings: You can create and move the affiliates to groups for easier segmentation and management. You can choose to add new affiliates to the default group. Once they start generating revenue you can promote them to special groups and pay high.
Affiliate portal and registration
Here you need to configure registration and affiliate portal settings.
You can enable affiliate registration approval to avoid spam submissions and get high-quality affiliates for your products. The development team is working on a feature to auto-approve the new registrants as affiliates in order to save time in approving each manually.
You can also configure how your affiliate portal should be. Solid Affiliate has its own affiliate portal form. You just need to add the shortcode [solid_affiliate_portal] to your affiliate portal page.
Above is the screenshot of the affiliate portal form of Solid Affiliate.
There are limited registration fields available for you to include in the form.
The downside with its affiliate portal form is you cannot add custom fields. For example, if you want affiliates’ contact numbers or addresses, you cannot add them. But as you can see in their roadmap, they are working on the form builder and adding more customization options to improve the functionality.
There are also options available for you to hide the affiliate portal from un-approved affiliates. You can customize the message that un-approved affiliates see on the landing page.
Managing affiliates
In the dashboard, you will see the manage affiliates tabs where you will manage all your affiliates. You can bulk approve or reject the affiliates.
The dashboard gives you a quick overview of each of the affiliate’s commission, status, affiliate groups they belong to, number of referrals they bring, net revenue, etc.
These are all the columns available for you to add for affiliates. You can enable only the columns you need to display under the screen options.
Similar to this, you can also manage referrals. Here you can see all the details of the referrals affiliates have bought – referral order amount, referral source, commission amount, commission status, etc.
When you click on edit product order, you will see the referral’s product order in the WooCommerce interface.
What’s more?
You can see how the commissions are calculated on each referral with commission insights. If you have set up any special commissions for your affiliates, these commission insights would be helpful to know where each commission came from.
Commission rates
With this tool, you can set up custom commission rates for your specific affiliates, products, and product categories.
Commission rate overrides
Solid Affiliate has a commission rate override tool to prioritize the special commissions set.
According to the screenshot above, the commission rates you set for specific affiliates on specific products are highly prioritized.
You can of course experiment with different priority levels.
Affiliate-product rates
Under affiliate product rates you can give special discounts to your affiliates.
Click on manage affiliate product rates, this will take you to a new window.
As you can see, I have set a special commission rate of 70% for my affiliate on the product BloggingX Pro System.
Here you need to enter the affiliate ID and set the commission rate.
Affiliate group rates
With affiliate group rates, you can set a specific commission for each of the groups created.
For example, f or super-affiliates, I have set the commission rate to 50%. While the default affiliate group has a commission rate of 30%.
Creating specific affiliate groups will allow affiliates to be rewarded in bulk as they grow.
Coupons
Coupons are a great way to increase sales and earn more. Solid Affiliate integrates with WooCommerce native coupons, making it easy for you to give exclusive coupons to your affiliates.
Whenever the coupon is redeemed, the affiliate will be rewarded for the sale.
Notable features
With Solid Affiliate payouts and pay affiliates, you can manage all the payment-related tasks.
Use the “Pay your Affiliates” tool to bulk pay your affiliates. Applying filters will allow you to select affiliates for whom you wish to pay.
For example –
- You can select to pay for all the unpaid referrals who haven’t passed the grace period.
- Filter the referrals by custom time range.
Solid Affiliate allows you to pay either manually by exporting a CSV file or using PayPal’s bulk payout feature to automatically pay in bulk for all. For this, you need to have configured and enabled the PayPal integration.
You can view the history of previous payouts under the past bulk payouts tab.
Visits management
Under the visits tab, you will know if the referrals are converted into customers or not, the landing page URL from where the referral came, visitor’s IP address, timestamp of their visit to the site, etc.
Creatives
Under the creatives tab, you can create all the promotional materials for affiliates to use.
Affiliates will get access to these creatives on their dashboards. You can disable the creatives if you don’t want to give access to the affiliates.
Emails
With the Solid Affiliate emails tool, you can send customized emails for affiliates. You can use its default template or send customized plain text emails. You can add multiple affiliate manager emails if you have a team to manage an affiliate program to receive email notifications.
You can select the email notifications which you and the affiliates can receive.
Email notifications for affiliate managers:
- New affiliate registration
- New referrals
Email notifications for affiliates:
- When an affiliate application is approved
- When they earn through referrals
You can customize the email subject and the body of all these four emails using affiliate and referral tags.
Misc
There are some miscellaneous settings available. You can auto-reject the unpaid referrals when they request a refund.
When the plugin is uninstalled, you can select to delete all the data. Currently, this is in the development phase.
Also, to avoid spam affiliates, you can enable reCAPTCHA. This is also not live yet. You will get this in the near future.
Reports and analytics
Solid Affiliate has in-depth reports for you to track and monitor your affiliate program. The reports give a visual representation of the data so you can analyze the ups and downs of your affiliate performance easily.
You can analyze various reports of affiliates, referrals, payouts, and visits each in separate tabs.
In the overview tab, you can view all the reports with various metrics, like referrals, referral amount, commission amount, net revenue, visits, payouts, payout amount, and much more. You can select the custom time range to analyze the reports.
Integrations
Solid Affiliate lags behind its competitors like AffiliateWP when it comes to integrations.
As of now, it only has PayPal and MailChimp integrations.
You need to activate the MailChimp integration by providing the API key and enabling the affiliates’ sync with the MailChimp account. With this, your affiliate contacts will be synced as lists in MailChimp.
There are more integrations to come in the near future. Currently, they are working on Zapier, Keap, and HubSpot native integrations.
How does Solid Affiliate compare to its competitors?
Solid Affiliate vs AffiliateWP
AffiliateWP is more feature-rich compared to Solid Affiliate. AffiliateWP has plenty of integrations available with eCommerce and membership plugins, WP-CLI integration, hooks and templates to add custom development, exporting the data to CSV, and much more.
Note that with Solid Affiliate there are no additional addons you need to buy. But with AffiliateWP you need to buy its add-ons to access its features like pushover notifications, affiliate portal, Zapier for AffiliateWP, etc.
AffiliateWP costs are high compared to Solid Affiliate. There are no lifetime plans available, you no need to purchase yearly plans with the lowest starting at $299/year.
Solid Affiliate vs Ultimate Affiliates Pro
Ultimate Affiliates Pro is an Envato product. Users have reported a lot of bugs and it has poor support.
Compared to Solid Affiliate, it has some unique features like Stripe payouts, social share, optin integrations, custom fields form, QR codes, and much more.
It costs $69/year, if you need quality support you need to pay an additional charge of $24.
Pricing and support
Solid Affiliate is currently running a lifetime deal at $139. Pay once and use it forever. This lifetime fee is really cheap and you will get access to all of its features with future updates.
If you don’t like Solid Affiliate, you can request a money refund within 6o days.
Solid Affiliate has live chat, support tickets, and documentation guides to assist you. Their documentation guides are not so in-depth.
You can submit support tickets and the team will reply within 24-48 hours.
Conclusion
If you are a WordPress user and thinking of setting up an affiliate program for your WooCommerce store, Solid Affiliate is the best plugin you can choose.
Its pricing is affordable, you can use it forever with lifetime updates. It is the best value for your money.
When it comes to usage, Solid Affiliate is super easy to get started even for a newbie.
They are working on a form builder to add more customization options and also adding more integrations. You can expect more to come in the near future.
Hope you loved this review on Solid Affiliate.
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