Meeting sales targets and satisfying demanding customers require effective marketing techniques.
And one of the sure-shot ways is to have an affiliate program for WooCommerce. Recruit an army of affiliates that can bring you qualified leads that convert.
However, you need the right affiliate plugin to lead a successful affiliate program.
Here we will review YITH WooCommerce Affiliates and Affiliates for WooCommerce in a head-to-head comparison. We will see their features, pros and cons, and pricing information to assist you in coming to a decision.
By the end of this blog, you will figure out which one is the right fit for your business.
YITH WooCommerce Affiliates overview
With YITH WooCommerce Affiliates, you can form collaborations with customers, bloggers, influencers, and others and ask them to generate traffic to your shop via blog articles, social media posts, and so on.
You can use this plugin to set different commission rates for different affiliate partners depending on their efficiency and revenue generation. You can also allocate coupons for your affiliates to promote your products and increase sales.
Note – YITH WooCommerce Affiliates plugin images on this blog are taken from their landing pages on the WordPress site and their own website.
The plugin comes in both free and premium versions. Let’s look at some key free and premium features.
Free version features:
- Enable default forms for affiliate registration and approve or reject them manually.
- Allow affiliates to share their referral link on social media.
- Prevent affiliates from getting commissions from their own purchases.
- Set a default commission for all affiliates.
- A personalized affiliate dashboard for affiliates to track visits, monitor conversions, and examine their commissions and payment status.
- Pay commissions manually via direct bank/wire transfer.
Premium version features:
- Custom forms for affiliate registration and automatic approval.
- Set commissions based on specific products, product categories, affiliate tags, user roles.
- Assign coupons to affiliates for promotion.
- Email notifications for the commission paid/generated.
- Detailed commission reports for each product – advanced reports (visits, commissions, earnings, popular affiliates, popular products, etc.
- Export commissions and affiliates into a CSV file.
- Pay commissions through PayPal.
Looking at the features, the free version is quite restricted. You must switch to the premium version of the plugin to make the most of your affiliate program.
Pricing:
YITH WooCommerce Affiliates plugin is priced at $165 for a single-year subscription. This includes one year of support and updates.
Try YITH WooCommerce Affiliates demo
Affiliate for WooCommerce overview
Affiliate for WooCommerce is one of the best-selling plugins on the WooCommerce marketplace by StoreApps. It is consistently rated 5 stars.
StoreApps is the same team behind the original Smart Coupons extension, Smart Offers and other products.
With Affiliate for WooCommerce plugin, you/store admin can easily manage everything from a single place without switching between numerous screens – setting up different commission rates, making payouts, tracking referrals, revenues and commissions, and marketing campaigns.
Affiliate for WooCommerce plugin is the simplest way to boost your brand’s value, gain customers, and increase revenue.
Key features:
- Default and custom registration forms to allow users to sign up for your affiliate program.
- Automatically or manually approve affiliates.
- Assign coupons for referrals.
- Compatible with Smart Coupons to bulk generate, import and export coupons for affiliates.
- Allow affiliates to share their referral link on social media, email, blogs, and anywhere else.
- Prevent affiliates from getting commissions from their own purchases.
- Dedicated dashboard for store owners and affiliates respectively to monitor performance and stats – check earnings, the most popular products sold, campaign assets, and more! Reports are real-time, precise, and sophisticated.
- Set a default commission rate.
- Set different commission rates based on products, product categories, affiliates and affiliate tags.
- Create a multi-tier affiliate program.
- Export affiliates’ data to CSV based on search filters.
- Make payouts via PayPal or manually by direct bank/wire transfer.
Pricing:
Affiliate for WooCommerce plugin costs $129 which includes one year of support and updates.
Try Affiliate for WooCommerce demo
YITH WooCommerce Affiliates vs Affiliates for WooCommerce – which one stands where?
Let’s see how the two WoCommerce affiliate program plugins compare with each other. Though the plugins share common features, there are differences there as well.
Setting up the plugin
Both YITH WooCommerce Affiliates and Affiliates for WooCommerce plugins are easy to install.
Once installed and activated, you’ll need to set some settings related to the registration forms, affiliate approval, cookies, coupons for referral, exclude products from the commission, etc.
You are then set to accept affiliate requests and set up commission rules.
For more details, refer to this YITH WooCommerce Affiliates docs and Affiliate for WooCommerce docs respectively.
Affiliate registration forms
Forms are the primary elements or the link between your affiliates and your program. Both plugins provide registration forms that can be customized.
Custom-create an advanced form wherein, you can include as many fields as you want – email, name, contact, website URL, social media links, how affiliates will promote your brand and so on.
You can show or hide the fields as well as specify which of these fields are required.
However, Affiliate for WooCommerce goes a step ahead to provide integration with plugins like Elementor Form Builder and Contact Form 7 to beautify your affiliate forms.
Affiliate referral links and coupons
Once affiliates fill up the registration form, the store admin can take a call on accepting or rejecting an affiliate.
With YITH WooCommerce Affiliates:
- Store owners can automatically approve all affiliates or manually approve each application.
- Add an affiliate manually from an existing user or manually add an affiliate by creating a new user.
- Option to reject and ban affiliates.
- Affiliates can generate custom URLs for different pages.
- Use coupons instead of affiliate referral links.
With Affiliate for WooCommerce:
- Store owners can automatically approve all affiliates or manually approve each application.
- Option to reject affiliates.
- Automatically make some users your affiliates based on their user role – Customer, Editor, Subscriber…
- Affiliates can generate custom URLs for different pages.
- Use coupons instead of affiliate referral links.
- Affiliates can modify the affiliate tracking parameter and also make the affiliate URL pretty.
Commission plans
Commission plans are the real game changer in affiliate programs. With the commission plans or rules, you can decide which affiliate will earn how much and on what.
For example, 20% default commission to John, but 25% commission to Jenny on the sale of handbags, flat $10 commission on the sale of best-sellers, 35% commission only to Influencers…
With the YITH WooCommerce Affiliates plugin, you can offer varying commissions to your affiliates based on:
- Products
- Product category
- Affiliate tag
- Specific user roles
With Affiliate for WooCommerce, you can create custom commission plans based on:
- Products
- Product category
- Affiliates
- Affiliate tag
Multi-tier affiliate program
High commissions affect your profits. Affiliates are demotivated by low commissions.
So, what contributes to striking harmony between the two? Also, how can you get more individuals to register for your affiliate program?
You can use the Affiliate for WooCommerce plugin to create a multi-tier affiliate program with an ‘n’ number of tiers. Affiliates receive commissions on both their own sales and sales made by individuals they refer to your program.
YITH WooCommerce Affiliates plugin does not provide a multi-tier affiliate program feature.
Marketing campaigns
Affiliate for WooCommerce plugin allows you to set up numerous marketing campaigns.
Include promotional resources like images, videos, logos, banners, e-books, etc., in the campaign. The affiliates can access these materials and utilize them in their channels for promotion – emails, social, blogs, ads, etc.
With the YITH WooCommerce Affiliates plugin, you won’t find this campaign feature.
Payouts
With YITH WooCommerce Affiliates, you can make the payouts manually and record the payment. Or, completely automate the commission payouts using PayPal or Stripe by combining with the following tools:
With the Affiliate for WooCommerce plugin, you can pay your affiliates manually or via PayPal (free plugin).
In manual payouts, you pay the affiliate out of this plugin (direct bank / wire transfer, cash, cheque payments, credits and reward points) and can record the payouts in the tool. You can also do a mass payout to your affiliates using the Payouts API for PayPal.
Affiliates dashboard
Both plugins provide a dedicated dashboard for affiliates to monitor their performance.
What Affiliate for WooCommerce miss out compared to YITH WooCommerce Affiliates?
- Ban affiliates
- Create a custom affiliate dashboard page using the shortcode.
- Commission rates based on user role
- Associate old commissions to new users with the same token.
What YITH WooCommerce Affiliates miss out compared to Affiliate for WooCommerce?
- Multi-tier affiliate program.
- Better commission plan rules.
- Promotional marketing campaigns.
- Search for affiliates using predefined filters.
- Make affiliate URL pretty and also customize URL parameters.
So which WooCommerce affiliate plugin is better?
Though both the plugins have a lot in common – forms, commission rules, payouts, compatibility with WooCommerce Subscriptions, Affiliate for WooCommerce has an edge:
- Simple setup that allows you to launch your affiliate program in a matter of minutes.
- Larger feature set
- Less expensive
- No complicated interfaces, no jargon, and not too many dashboards.
Conclusion
With the help of a good affiliate plugin, you can ensure that your affiliate marketing program runs smoothly.
There are features similar in both the WooCommerce Affiliate plugins, but the design, configuration, added features, advancements, and user experience may differ.
Now that you know about these solid WooCommerce affiliate plugins – YITH WooCommerce Affiliates and Affiliate for WooCommerce, we leave the final decision to you.