These past couple of weeks, besides focusing on major features, we’ve also been working on some smaller, quality of life, improvements.
Our goal from the very start was to create the most easy-to-use affiliates plugin for WordPress. These changes are geared towards this goal.
Let’s dive into the updates, starting with a highly requested feature…
Logout option in the affiliate account
Up until now, if your affiliates wanted to log out from their account they would either have to:
- Navigate to the affiliate login page, where there’s a logout link present when logged-in;
- Navigate to your shop’s customer account and search for the logout link;
- Or search for a logout link somewhere on your website.
As you can notice, none of the above options are straightforward. Our premise for the logout functionality was that affiliates prefer to remain logged-in as much as possible, as it would simplify their workflow.
However, after discussing with a few customers, we realized that not everyone is comfortable leaving their computers while remaining logged-in. After all, affiliates have sensible data in their accounts that they want to protect.
So, to address this issue, we added an option to have the logout link in the affiliate’s account, where it’s easily accessible. Here’s how you can turn this feature on:
- Navigate to your admin dashboard > SliceWP > Settings > General (tab) > Pages Settings (section).
- Look for the “Affiliate Account Logout” option, enable it and then save the settings.
That’s it. If you now access the affiliate account page, a logout link will appear in the account’s navigation menu, right at the end.
User experience improvements for the affiliate account
While discussing with a potential customer that was testing SliceWP, she confessed timidly that she has no idea what the “Generate Affiliate Link” functionality from the affiliate account does.
I explained that it’s a tool affiliates can use to turn any URL from her website into an affiliate promotional link. Her affiliates only need to copy any URL from her website, paste it in the field and then click the “Generate” button to create a new promotional link.
Easy enough, right?! Well, not if you’re using this tool for the first time.
We realized that we were so accustomed with this feature that we failed to put ourselves in the shoes of an affiliate that is interacting with the tool for the first time.
Affiliates had close to no guidance when it came to using the generate affiliate link feature.
However, this has now changed. We’ve added helpful messages to guide affiliates. Here’s a before and after of the “Affiliate Links” tab of the affiliate account:
Quick copy of an affiliate’s referral link from the admin area
As you know, SliceWP offers a simple method for affiliates to quickly grab their referral link (you can spot it in the above screenshots).
This feature is crucial for your affiliates’ workflow. The easier it is for them to grab any of their assets, the easier it will be for them to promote your business.
When it comes to the people on the other side of the affiliate program, the managers (that’s you if you’re managing the program by yourself), there wasn’t an easy way to copy an affiliate’s referral link. You would have had to manually build it, by following our documentation guide.
However, from now on, you will no longer need to manually build these links. You can quickly grab them from your WordPress dashboard. Here’s how:
- Navigate to SliceWP > Affiliates.
- Click the “link” icon that appears next to the affiliate’s name.
That’s it. The affiliate’s referral link will be copied to the clipboard and you can paste it anywhere you need to.
Notes column for admin tables
When we built the notes system, our goal was to create a simple tool so that you could leave notes in the right places.
If you had any thoughts about a particular affiliate, you could just leave a note for that affiliate and call it a day. This way, you can lower the risk of forgetting valuable information.
The notes system works great for smaller affiliate program, because it’s relatively easy to remember where you left a note.
However, if you’re managing a bigger program that has many affiliates, commissions and payouts, we found that it’s quite hard to keep track of notes.
To help you track down notes more easily, we’ve added a new column to the tables from the admin area, where you can see the number of notes for that particular affiliate, commission or payout. The new column is similar to the comments one from the posts table. Here’s how it looks:
Over to you
These improvements wouldn’t be possible without your feedback. So, I’d like to thank all of you that reached out with questions and ideas.
Our goal is to make SliceWP the best affiliate plugin for WordPress. As you can imagine, this isn’t an easy task. But with your feedback, we’re confident we can make it happen. So, please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions, find bugs or have ideas on how we can improve SliceWP.
Until next time, please make sure to update the plugin to the latest version to benefit from these new changes.
