Yith Woocommerce Plugin
Bonifacia Cramm
YITH WooCommerce Affiliates is a solid affiliate plugin from a solid plugin company, but there is a reason why we have ranked it #6 in our Best WooCommerce Affiliate Plugins list: it lacks the sophistication of the top plugins.
One of the first differences you'll notice about YITH WooCommerce Affiliates is the lack of a formal setup wizard or onboarding process. Instead, you must use a set of configuration tabs found at YITH > Affiliates in the main WordPress menu.
Unlike using a wizard, this means that you must have some prior understanding of the components required to configure an affiliate plugin, but this is not as onerous as it sounds. Most WordPress users are accustomed to learning about a plugin's setup requirements through similar configuration pages.
As you can see, the purpose of each option is described by a combination of a label and a description. But there are some, such as Query var name and Allow users to enter a token at checkout in this panel, that will require you to dig through documentation.
Whether this is good or bad depends on your perspective. For someone launching their first affiliate marketing program, we prefer the wizard approach offered by the #1 plugin in our Best WooCommerce Affiliate Plugins list, Solid Affiliate. In that model, you can be up and running in minutes without the need to dig through any documentation. The plugin assumes responsibility for most advanced settings, though you can certainly modify them if needed.
The Pending button in the Status column identifies new affiliate applicants. You can approve or reject the affiliate by hovering over the row containing the applicant and clicking one of the options in a drop-down menu (not shown). Alternatively, you can click the edit button that appears, review the affiliate's details, and take your actions from there.
One of the most important of these categories is having the flexibility to create commission rates for all possible scenarios. In this regard, YITH WooCommerce Affiliates has both strengths and weaknesses.
On the strength side, YITH allows you to override the default rate for any combination of product, product category, user, and user role, as you can see here in this partial screenshot of the Affiliate rates page:
YITH also doesn't provide convenient access to creative material (banner ads, text, promotional videos, and other marketing assets) that affiliates can use to kickstart their marketing campaigns. This isn't that big a deal, as store owners can always give affiliates access to this type of material via a custom page, but it's a nice touch when these marketing assets are already integrated with the affiliate portal.
This is the same approach that we see with the top plugins, with no real advantage for one over another, except possibly Solid Affiliate, which includes 30-day statistics on visits and referrals to provide a better summary of recent activity.
It also allows you to specify a date range and to apply a simple filter that lets you examine all affiliates, individual affiliates, or even compare affiliates. And this, frankly, is all you need for a small, simple affiliate program.
Why does this matter? If you're running a large affiliate program, likely for a large WooCommerce store, it is unlikely that one affiliate approach is going to work across all your products or for all the different types of affiliates you recruit. In that scenario, having more flexibility to slice-and-dice your affiliate program data, or to launch tests and be able to monitor the results of those tests, will go a long way to helping you plot a path to affiliate marketing success.
Our goal in writing a review like this is not to do a feature dump on you. We try instead to convey the basic nature of each plugin so that you can quickly focus on the one(s) that seem to best meet your needs. But we also don't want to sell YITH short, so here is a quick list of important features that we haven't covered in this review:
For those not familiar with exchange rates, this amounts to between $190 and $200 US per year as of this article's publication, which makes it the 3rd least expensive option of the affiliate plugins that we've reviewed.
In the case of YITH, we probably have a small bias because we already know them as a quality company that makes quality software, witness their 94 % 5-star ratings across 1,720 reviews on Trustpilot. Most of these reviews are not specific to the YITH WooCommerce Affiliates plugin, but they do indicate the high quality of the company itself.
This is especially true if you read a significant sample of the reviews. Yes, there is the odd negative review (4 % or so), but as with most good software companies, YITH replies to every complaint in some detail. And the devil, as they say, is always in the details.
This is also true of the 17 reviews you'll find at -woocommerce-affiliates/, which are specific to YITH's affiliates plugin. At first glance, the 70 % score for 5-star ratings is not impressive (we prefer plugins where this figure is above 90 %). But if you dig deeper, you will see that there has not been a negative review in nearly two years.
As our #6 ranking for this plugin already indicates, we do not view this as the best WooCommerce affiliate plugin. But as we've also mentioned several times, that's not the point. The point is whether a plugin is a good fit for your WooCommerce store, the affiliate marketing program you envision, and your budget.
I am trying to: I have view displaying list of Woocommerce products. In the view I'm using YITH WooCommerce Request A Quote Premium plugin's shortcode [yith_ywraq_button_quote] to display Add to quote button. This works fine when user is logged in. But when user is logged out the button is not displayed.
It will be a better solution I believe as we will have option to tell the shortcode what product actually you want to query as we pass the product ID and there will be less compatibility issue like we have currently that $product variable is overridden by them or any other plugin.
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