With every release, we keep working towards our promise of giving you the best affiliate plugin for WordPress. And today, I’m really excited to share one of the most requested additions to SliceWP: you can now pay your affiliates through Stripe, directly from your WordPress dashboard.
Once everything is set up, paying your affiliates is just a couple of clicks away. Let’s dive into how it works.
But first: A new home for your payout settings
Alongside Stripe, we’ve also given your payout settings a proper home. Everything related to paying your affiliates now lives under its own dedicated Payouts tab in SliceWP > Settings, instead of being tucked inside the General tab.
Inside the new payouts tab, you’ll find two cards. General Settings is where you set your default payout method, your payments minimum amount and your refund grace period, the options that shape how your payouts are put together. Payout Methods is where you configure and enable each way of paying your affiliates and it’s exactly where you’ll set up your new Stripe connection.
It’s a small change, but it gives payouts the space they deserve and makes setting up Stripe (and everything else) that much easier to find.
Now, let’s dive into how the Stripe integration works.
How paying affiliates with Stripe works
The idea behind Stripe payouts is simple: you connect your Stripe platform account to SliceWP, each of your affiliates connects their own Stripe account and when it’s time to pay, SliceWP tells Stripe to transfer each affiliate their earnings.
To be clear about what’s happening behind the scenes, SliceWP handles the whole process for you, from grouping commissions into payments to instructing Stripe to send the money, while the payments themselves are made through your own Stripe account. SliceWP is the control panel and Stripe moves the money.
Getting started on your end takes just a moment. You add your Stripe secret key in your WordPress admin area > SliceWP > Settings > Payouts > Payout Methods > Stripe and SliceWP takes care of the rest of the setup automatically, including the webhooks that keep everything in sync (more on that below).
Your affiliates connect their own Stripe account
One of the things I really like about this integration is that your affiliates are in control of where their money goes. Each affiliate connects their own Stripe account to your site, straight from their affiliate account.
From the Settings tab of their affiliate account, your affiliates select their country and click Connect with Stripe. Stripe guides them through a secure onboarding flow, and once they’re done, they’re brought right back to their affiliate account with everything ready to go.
And because it’s their own Stripe account, they can open their Stripe dashboard at any time to manage their details and track their payouts.
Paying your affiliates
When it comes to actually paying, you have two options, and both live inside the payouts system you already know. You can pay a single affiliate at a time from a payment’s page or you can pay all the affiliates in a payout at once.
Bulk payments are processed quietly in the background, so even large payouts are handled reliably without your page timing out. Any affiliate who hasn’t connected a Stripe account yet is simply skipped, so you never have to worry about a payout getting stuck.
Pay affiliates in their local currency
If you work with affiliates around the world, you’ll love this one. With cross-border transfers, you can pay affiliates located in the US, UK, EEA, Canada, or Switzerland in their local currency, as long as your own Stripe account is based in one of those same regions.
It’s an optional setting you can switch on whenever you’re ready, and it opens the door to rewarding your international affiliates without asking them to deal with currency conversions on their end.
Everything stays in sync, automatically
Payments don’t always end the moment they’re sent, so SliceWP keeps an eye on things for you. Using webhooks that are set up automatically when you connect your account, SliceWP stays in step with Stripe, so if a transfer is ever reversed, the payment and its commissions are updated to reflect that without you lifting a finger.
You can also check whether an affiliate is ready to be paid at any time, right from their profile, so you always know where things stand before you run a payout.
Before you update
This update includes affiliate-facing changes, since your affiliates will now see the option to connect their Stripe account. As always, please make sure to test the new version on a staging environment before updating your live website.
To help you get everything set up, we’ve put together a detailed step-by-step guide on paying your affiliates with Stripe.
Wrapping it up
That’s it for now! Paying your affiliates has never been this fast or this flexible and I can’t wait for you to try it out. Make sure you’re running the latest version of SliceWP Pro to get access to Stripe payouts.
As always, I love hearing from you. If there’s something you’d still like to see in SliceWP, please let us know. Your feedback is what shapes every one of these updates.
