Today’s product update is a biggie! We’ve been busy these past few weeks rebuilding parts of the payouts system to make it easier and quicker for you to pay your affiliates. Here’s everything that’s new:
- Pay your affiliates with store credit (for WooCommerce stores)
- Set payout method per affiliate
- Bulk payments process overhaul
- Process single payment, not just bulk payments
Pay your affiliates with store credit
As you may already know, you can already pay your affiliates directly from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard with PayPal Payouts. With just a few clicks you can pay all affiliates, quickly and easily.
Now, alongside PayPal, you can pay affiliates with store credit.
Instead of actually transferring money between accounts, you can deposit your affiliates’ unpaid commissions as credit into a virtual wallet on your website. Your affiliates will then be able to use this credit to make discounted purchases from your store.
We’ve detailed all you need to know about store credit payouts in our documentation, so go right ahead and learn more by clicking this link.
Please note that making purchases with store credit is currently available only for WooCommerce stores.
Set payout method per affiliate
Now that we’ve expanded the ways you can pay your affiliates, it was also important to offer you a flexible way to process affiliate payments.
Up until now you could only process an entire payout through one single payout method. For example, if you had 10 affiliate payments ready to be paid, then you could only process them in bulk, either manually or through PayPal Payouts.
From now on however you will be able to process payments based on the selected payout method for the affiliate. For example, if you have 3 affiliates that you wish to pay with PayPal, 3 with store credit and 4 manually, you will be able to process all of these payments within a single payout.
Here’s how the system works behind the scenes:
When you set up your affiliate program, you will be able to select a default payout method. Currently, these methods are Manual, PayPal Payouts and Store Credit.
The default payout method will govern over all affiliates. However, if you set another payout method for a particular affiliate, the default method will be overwritten and the one set for the affiliate will be used instead when processing a payment.
Bulk payments process overhaul
Because you can now process multiple payout methods in the same payout, we’ve also overhauled the bulk payments system.
Firstly, you will now find a redesigned Payout Progress section in the payout page, which includes the number of payments and amount you’ve paid and the number of payments and amount you still have to pay.
Here’s how it looks:
Secondly, when you select to bulk process all payments under a particular payout method, the drop-down now shows you how many payments will be processed, their total amount and also explains what happens behind the scenes with these payments.
This way, you will have all the information at your disposal, so you can feel confident when you bulk process affiliate payments.
Process single payment
For even more flexibility and control, you can now also process each payment, one by one, instead of opting for bulk processing.
You can do this in two ways:
1. Either from the main payout page, in the payments table, by clicking the three dots actions menu of the payment.
2. Or from the new Process Payment panel found in the payment’s review page.
Make sure to update
If you’re already a SliceWP customer, to benefit from these latest features right away please update the plugin core and all of the add-ons to their latest versions.
If you don’t yet have a SliceWP license, you can purchase one here. We promise, you’ll love creating and managing your own affiliate program with SliceWP.
P.S. We’re constantly looking to improve SliceWP and make it the best affiliate plugin for WordPress. So if you’re missing anything from SliceWP, please don’t hesitate to reach out and let us know what you need.
