Affiliate Archives - Business Bloomer

How I Ditched a WooCommerce Plugin for My Own Code

Premium WooCommerce plugins are great — until you realize you’re only using 10% of the features, while still loading all the code, dealing with updates, and paying for a license you don’t fully need.

That’s exactly what happened to me. One of my plugins was doing a job I could replicate with a few custom functions. So I decided to ditch it and replace it with my own code — lightweight, specific, and built just for my store.

But I didn’t just jump into coding blindly. I documented the whole process in a 3-part YouTube series, from scoping the replacement, to prompting an AI for help, to testing the final result on a dev store.

In this post, I’ll summarize the approach, share key takeaways from each step, and help you decide when it makes sense to build instead of buy — especially if you’re comfortable writing WooCommerce snippets.

Exploring Alternatives to AffiliateWP for WooCommerce Integration

In a recent Business Bloomer Club discussion, WooCommerce store owners shared their thoughts on the flexibility and effectiveness of AffiliateWP.

AffiliateWP has been a long-time favorite for its strong WooCommerce integration and extensive PHP customization capabilities. However, some store owners wonder if there are lighter alternatives that still offer robust integration and customizability.

For those who have been using AffiliateWP for years without exploring other options, this post dives into possible alternatives and considerations.

WooCommerce: Should You Enable “Direct Link Tracking” for AffiliateWP?

In a Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, members shared insights about Direct Link Tracking (DLT), a feature offered by AffiliateWP’s higher-tier plans. DLT allows affiliates to omit referral parameters in URLs, enabling a more natural linking experience.

However, given the significant cost difference—particularly for legacy users on AffiliateWP’s legacy plans—the decision to upgrade is complex. Here’s a deeper look into whether DLT is worth the investment, especially if you’re in the early stages of your affiliate program.

WooCommerce: Split Revenue On Specific Products

Well, this is one of those “steal my setup” tutorials – because I’m going to share the system I use to generate commission/split revenue records when specific products (which are the result of business partnerships) are purchased on the Business Bloomer WooCommerce website.

Let me explain. Imagine an online course that comes with an owner (Mary) and a teacher (John). Mary and John have a 50/50 split revenue agreement: whenever the online course is purchased, Mary must notify John of such a purchase, and log a 50% commission/referral in the system. John will then have access to the dashboard where there are stats, total amount due, and can then request a payment/withdrawal at the end of the month.

Another example, which is the one that also applies to my WooCommerce Mini-Plugins business. In this case, there is Business Bloomer (Rodolfo, the owner), and a plugin developer (XYZ, the coder). If our agreement is to split revenue equally, Rodolfo must log the earnings that XYZ generated for each WooCommerce sale, so that XYZ can manually request a payment based on the due amount.

So, to recap, when a WooCommerce product is purchased, how do we generate a record of the “partner” earnings somewhere, so that they can access and check their total?

WooCommerce: How to Start an Affiliate Program in 4 Steps

There are many different ways to reach potential new customers and grow your business. However, most of these methods cost money regardless of whether you achieve the desired results.

That’s where affiliate marketing comes in. It is a popular marketing model where you recruit third parties to drive people to your WooCommerce store and purchase your products.

With the right motivation and incentives, these external marketers can be just as indispensable as an in-house marketing team. Even better, you’ll only pay for successful conversions.

If you have a WooCommerce store, it’s easy to create your own affiliate program. Once your program is up and running, you can start signing up affiliate partners. These people will then do all of the hard work for you!

Every time a customer makes a purchase after following an affiliate link, the marketer will get a cut of the profits, and you get to keep the rest. It’s a win-win situation for you and your affiliate partner. Maybe that’s why affiliate spending is forecast to reach $8.2 billion by 2022!

In this post, we’ll discuss why using affiliate programs is one of the most effective ways to grow your business. We’ll then show how to create an affiliate program for your WooCommerce store in four easy steps. Let’s get started!

WooCommerce: How To Manage Sales Reps / Agents

Sales agents and representatives are an integral part of many businesses’ operational models. However, there’s little to no support in WooCommerce by default for agents, as the platform is built and optimized for typical retail shops.

Managing customers and customer relationships is critical for any business, but even more so for businesses with a large customer base, high transaction values, B2B, wholesale, or affiliate models. Agents are the link between the business and the customer, and may be doing everything from providing sales counsel, to taking and placing orders, or even directly managing and handling individual customer orders.

Each shop might work differently, but what they have in common is that they need an ecommerce solution capable of giving agents a platform with powerful, but limited control over customers and orders.

In this article, we’ll take a look at how a WooCommerce business can add and manage sales agents, as well as useful tricks, tips, and plugins that can help.

WooCommerce: 5 Plugins That Will Increase Your Conversions

Conversion rate is one of the most important metrics to look out for when running an online store.

Once you have your store all set up and start attracting traffic to your site through SEO and paid advertising, it’s now time to look at how many of your store’s visitors are converting.

Let’s step back for a moment and take a look at what a conversion is, anyway? Conversion happens when a prospect does what you want them to do.

If the purpose of a page is to get the email address of the visitor, you’ll have a successful conversion when a visitor lands on your page and drops their email address.

In terms of eCommerce, conversions usually refer to the event when a visitor buys your products and completes the checkout process. Or simply put, it means a big, fat sale.

If you thought attracting people to your site was enough to persuade them to buy your products, well, you’re seriously mistaken. It turns out that the average conversion rate in eCommerce is only 1-2%. So, even if you’re doing everything right, you’ll be closing the deal only 2% of the time.

That means every little bit matters.

In this difficult territory of getting people to convert, comes a list of growth-hacking and optimization plugins for WooCommerce that will put your store’s conversions on fire.

WooCommerce: How to Run an Affiliate / Referral Program?

There is no doubt – one of the fastest, most affordable and easiest ways to increase your WooCommerce sales is to “hire your own customers”.

You’ve probably heard of affiliate commissions, referral programs, influencer marketing, brand ambassadors and so on. Online brands are doing all they can to promote this strategy and tap into their fans’ communities.

As a WooCommerce store owner, no matter whether you sell digital or physical products, you should definitely give an affiliate program a go. Besides, what if I told you enabling such a complex system was actually super easy?

With a simple plugin you can immediately add an affiliate marketing program to your WooCommerce website, give registered affiliates their own dashboard with statistics and revenue, pay them via PayPal or Stripe either manually, immediately or monthly and basically do absolutely no coding or complex set up.

Decide your referral commission (e.g. $10 per product, or 15% per order), install the affiliate plugin, contact all your existing customers, subscribers, fans, followers and see your sales grow.

For such a little investment, your returns might be reasonable enough and there is really nothing stopping you from implementing this today.

In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the most reliable WooCommerce Affiliate plugins. They all do the trick, so it’s up to you to make that final choice.

Tag: Affiliate