The past couple of months have been very very busy here at SliceWP. We pushed new features, released our knowledge base and, the thing we’re most proud of, we managed to onboard our first customers.
If in our January transparency report we were detailing why we didn’t generate any sales, today we’re happy and grateful to be able to help a handful of businesses grow.
Our mission however has just started. The road to creating one of the best affiliate marketing plugins for WordPress is a long one, but we’re more confident than ever that we can travel it.
In order to be able to do this, we need to be competitive, creative and put in the work to make sure you have the right tools to run a successful affiliate program.
Read on to find out what’s new with SliceWP and what is on our product roadmap for April.
Paid Member Subscriptions and Paid Memberships Pro integrations
Our goal from the very start was to integrate SliceWP with a host of eCommerce WordPress plugins. We started of with WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads, as they’re both highly reputable and have extensive developer documentations.
Now we’re taking everything a big step further: we’re tackling subscriptions.
And we’re starting with Paid Member Subscriptions and Paid Memberships Pro, two amazing plugins that help you protect your content and offer access to it only to paying users. Both of them will turn your WordPress website into the ideal membership website.
To start rewarding your affiliates for subscription referrals, through either Paid Member Subscriptions or Paid Memberships Pro, go to SliceWP -> Settings -> Integrations (tab) and turn on the appropriate switch.
Please note that currently commissions will be generated only for the subscription’s first payment. Rewarding commissions for recurring payments is a feature we already have on our development list. However, it isn’t yet planned.
New commission type: subscription
With the integration of subscription based plugins, we also added a new commission type, namely “subscription”, which will be used by these plugins.
This new commission type comes as a helper in case you’re running both a store and a membership website, and wish to reward different commission amounts.
The setting is available from your WordPress administrator screen, in SliceWP -> Settings (tab) -> Commissions Settings (section).
The subscription commission rate can also be set for each individual affiliate separately when using the Affiliate Commission Rates add-on.
As mentioned above, please note that commissions will be rewarded only for a subscription’s first payment.
New add-on: Affiliate Coupons
Using affiliate links to promote a product or service is a great marketing method. However, it’s not the only one.
We wanted to diversify the promotional methods you have in your affiliate marketing arsenal, so we build the Affiliate Coupons add-on. With it, you can assign affiliates to coupon codes.
The power of this is that you can then share these coupons with the assigned affiliates. Which in turn, can share them with their follower base. And thus, you’ll be able to track and reward affiliates based on what coupons have been used by customers referred by these affiliates.
This promotional method falls into the win-win-win bucket. You grow your business, your affiliates are rewarded for their efforts and customers benefit from a discount.
Pro tip: These kind of promotions work well with influencers, as it offers them a way to create value for their followers. In our influencer marketing article we go deep into how you can leverage affiliate marketing with influencers to generate more sales.
A simple, yet powerful, notes system
We are well aware of the difficulties associated with managing an affiliate program. This is why we’re dedicating resources to making your life a little bit easier by adding or improving even the most basic functionalities of SliceWP.
The new notes system is one of these small things that you may not even consider important. Until you need it.
With it you can now add extra information to affiliates, commissions, payments or payouts.
We already have plans to integrate the notes system deeply into the plugin’s core, mainly into the search system. Whenever you’ll need to search for something, information from attached notes will be taken into account.
Also, the PayPal Payouts add-on will soon display notes from PayPal for generated payouts. This way you’ll know exactly what your payout’s status is in PayPal.
Allow affiliates to earn commissions for their own orders
We strongly believe that affiliates are the bread and butter of any affiliate program. Because of this we believe it’s important to reward them for all their efforts.
One way you can do this is by allowing them to benefit from their own affiliate links and be rewarded commissions from their own sales.
Starting today, this is possible with SliceWP if you enable the Affiliate Own Commissions option from SliceWP -> Settings -> Commissions Settings (tab).
Delete payouts
Deleting a payout was something we were extremely wary of at start, given that it involves affiliate payments. Because of this, we decided that for the very first version of the plugin to make it impossible for administrators to remove payouts.
However, there are certain cases where you’d want to be able to remove a payout. These cases can be rare, but we have to acknowledge that they exist. For example, if you realize you generated a payout for the wrong dates, or for the wrong affiliate, you may want to delete it and have everything tidy.
So to make sure you don’t end up with unnecessary data in your database and also keep your SliceWP pages as clean as possible, we’ve added the ability to delete payouts.
Please note however that deleting a payout is limited only to the user that generated the payout. Also, once a payout has payments that have been paid, it cannot be removed.
Make sure to update
All of the above features are already available and you can benefit from them right away. Just make sure to update SliceWP core and add-ons to the latest versions.
We’ve done several tests to make sure everything is working nicely. Yet, because WordPress has so many plugins and themes, issue may appear. If you find yourself in a difficult situation, please reach out. We’re happy to help!
I want to leave you with a big thank you! Your support is what keeps us going like crazy.
