Welcome to a new product update! This one is again, a big one. Not a lot of major features, but quite a few small improvements designed to make your life and your affiliates’ lives easier.
Here’s everything that’s new:
- Affiliate dashboard redesign
- New key metrics: Referral Revenue and Net Referral Revenue
- New notification: Due Payouts
- New pro add-on: Affiliate Leaderboard
- Rebuilt translation files
Let’s dive in:
Affiliate dashboard redesign
After you update SliceWP to the most recent version, specifically 1.0.70, which will come out later this week, your affiliates will be met by a new restyled dashboard.
Here you have the before and after screenshots for a quick view (screenshots were made using the Storefront theme).
Our goal with this refreshed design was to bring the most important information right in front of your affiliates.
The new dashboard will be split into 3 sections:
- Last 30 day activity
- All time activity
- Program details
As you can notice from a first glance, we moved the affiliate program details from the top of the dashboard to the bottom. We’ve also separated the 30 day activity and all time activity into separate, more easy to grasp, sections.
But, that’s not all.
Templates
We’ve also refactored the entire affiliate account code to use our new templating system.
What this means is that you’ll now be able to build your own PHP template files, the same as you can do in WooCommerce, and build your affiliate account to your needs.
If you want to modify only a certain tab from the affiliate account, you can do this as well. Each tab has its own template file, that can be replaced by your own.
Developer hooks
We’ve also added two new action hooks to the top and bottom of the affiliate account:
- slicewp_affiliate_account_top
- slicewp_affiliate_account_bottom
With these you’ll be able to add extra content at the top, right before the navigation menu, and at the bottom, after the tabs.
New key metrics: Referral Revenue and Net Referral Revenue
With this new SliceWP update, we’re introducing two new metrics that are key for your affiliate program, namely “referral revenue” and “net referral revenue”.
These new metrics are tied to the referred order’s amount.
For example, let’s say that you have a 20% commission rate for your affiliate program. Now, let’s say that a new referred $100 order comes in. Because you have a 20% commission rate, $20 goes to your affiliate, while you keep $80.
For the above example, the $100 represents the referral revenue. This is the total amount of value your affiliate brought you. The $20 represents the commission amount and the $80 represents the net referral revenue that your affiliate generated.
A redesigned Totals panel
To accommodate these new metrics, we’ve also redesigned the Totals panel from SliceWP’s dashboard admin page.
The goal of this redesign was to simplify the panel as much as possible and keep only the most important key metrics, so you can view them in one quick glance.
Here are the before and after screenshots:
New notification: Due Payouts
We’ve also extended SliceWP’s notification system with a new message related to payments due to your affiliates. Here’s a screenshot with how this notification looks:
This message will appear whenever you have unpaid commissions ready to be paid to your affiliates.
The system takes into account both the minimum payments amount and the refund grace period, so you will see this message only when an affiliate has unpaid commissions that are outside of the grace period and that total at least the minimum payments amount you have set.
The message is also accompanied by a call to action, which will redirect you to the preview payout page, where you’ll see all the payout details.
New pro add-on: Affiliate Leaderboard
Say hello to a new pro add-on! Affiliate Leaderboard.
With it, you’ll be able to create affiliate leaderboards, to encourage your affiliates to up their game and generate more sales.
Here’s how an affiliate leaderboard, with default data, looks like (again, using the Storefront theme):
The add-on will feature a new highly customizable shortcode, namely [slicewp_affiliate_leaderboard].
You’ll be able to customize your leaderboards to your specific needs:
- set which data to showcase (columns include commissions, commission amounts, visits and even generated sales)
- sort the data by the column you prefer
- filter the data by a time range (for example, this month’s leaders, last month’s leaders, this year’s leaders and even custom date ranges)
Besides these included features, the add-on has been built from the ground up to be as developer friendly as possible. We’re leveraging WordPress’ hooks system to allow you to filter all the information presented in the table. You can add your custom columns with your custom data.
We’ve also used our new template system for the leaderboard table. If you’re not happy with the default table and you want to build your own affiliate leaderboard template, you can do it.
Rebuilt translation files
Because of the new interface changes, we’ve updated all of the translation files and also the plugin’s English .po base translation file.
If you were in the middle of translating SliceWP, please update your current .po translation file by importing all the strings from the new base .po file.
Don’t forget to test
This SliceWP update comes with affiliate facing interface changes. Please make sure to test the new plugin version on your test environments before updating your live websites.
Also, if you have custom CSS code applied to your affiliate dashboard, please inspect it. The new affiliate dashboard comes with some HTML and CSS class changes, so your code may not be up to date.
What are you missing from SliceWP?
As you know, our mission is to make SliceWP the best affiliate plugin for WordPress. So, if you have any feedback or ideas on how we can improve SliceWP, please contact us and let us know your thoughts.
That’s all for today! Until next time, wishing you all the best!
