There is a new plugin called Fluent Affiliate. As the name implies, this is a plugin for running an affiliate program. People who are course creators, selling products, even people doing consulting, may want to have an affiliate program. They are very popular online in many markets including in WordPress. It’s possible in the WordPress space 15-20% of sales or maybe even more are due to affiliate programs.
Video Version
The video has the full walk-though. Here we have some notes and a summary.
Integrations and Documentation
Fluent Affiliate is launching with a number of ecommerce system integrations, including WooCommerce, SureCart, FluentCart, and Easy Digital Downloads. FluentCart is brand new and I imagine it’s going to also become very popular.
In addition to those plugins there’s also integrations with Fluent Forms, Fluent CRM, Fluent Booking, then LearnDash, Lifter, and Tutor. These are the learning management plugins that are supported. Then there’s integration for Paymattic, for MemberPress, Paid Membership Pro, Give, and Voxel. Okay so plugin is launching with a lot of integrations.
I also want to mention that on the website, even though this is a new plugin, there’s already a lot of documentation here.
Discussion and Conclusions
The integration with the website is automatic once you install the plugin, but you need to setup the integrations for them to work. There is also a script to link in the affiliate visits if you use another website or platform.
I tested FluentAffiliate using FluentCart and FluentCommunity. The idea was to sell access to the community with FluentCart and using FluentAffiliates to track affiliate sales. This was all very smooth.
As an affiliate you can see the stats, the referrals, the visits, and the payouts. There is a dashboard for the affiliate manager that has an overview of your stats and how you’re doing. The manager can see the recent referrals and the top affiliates. It shows the total unpaid referrals, the active affiliates, the total visits, the total referrals, the conversion rate, and the pending affiliates. You can see the order total for the referrals and there’s a graph that you can take a look at with an adjustable the date filter. When you look at an affiliate you see this data which is very similar to what they see in their affiliate dashboard.
There is a report functionality for the affiliate manager so you can see the referrals and see who you might need to pay. When you do a payout you add a title for the report and add the date range. It shows the payout amounts. Payouts are manual, but after the payout is made, you confirm that to generate the report, and then you can also have an email go out when a payout is made.
You can have branded coupons for affiliates. So that’s nice. You can use their company name or other tag. You can disable referrals on upgrades and you can enable a custom rate for specific products or categories.
You can turn off and on registration. You can require admin approval, but if that is unchecked then people are auto approved. Then you can customize the sign up form. In my demo I customized the check box for agreeing to terms and conditions to put in a link to the terms page. Currently I think the only migration is from affiliate WP.
The WP Managed Ninja team are using FluentAffiliates on their own website. It has all the features that you would expect. There are quite a few integrations for launch.
