Solid Affiliate Review: WooCommerce Affiliate Program on a Budget

Why Every Online Seller Should Consider an Affiliate Program

If you're selling anything online, whether it's physical products, digital downloads, or online courses, affiliate marketing is one of the most undervalued growth channels available. Unlike Facebook ads or SEO campaigns that require significant upfront investment with no guarantee of return, affiliate marketing flips the model entirely. You only pay when affiliates actually generate sales for you.

That's the real beauty of it. You're aligning yourself with influencers, content creators, and other businesses that already have the audience you want to reach, and you're only paying them on performance. There's very little financial risk compared to traditional paid acquisition.

Solid Affiliate is a relatively new WordPress plugin that makes it possible to launch your own affiliate program on a WooCommerce store without the hefty recurring costs you'd typically associate with this kind of software. While established players like AffiliateWP charge around $300 per year, Solid Affiliate offers a one-time payment option for unlimited sites at a fraction of that cost. The trade-off is that Solid Affiliate is laser-focused on WooCommerce and WooSubscriptions, so if you need support for Easy Digital Downloads or deep third-party integrations, AffiliateWP still has the edge.

How to Get Affiliates Signed Up and Approved

Getting your affiliate program off the ground starts with setting up the infrastructure inside WordPress. Solid Affiliate includes a setup wizard that walks you through the essentials: confirming WooCommerce is active, optionally connecting WooCommerce Subscriptions, configuring outgoing email so affiliate notifications actually land in inboxes, authenticating your license, and creating the affiliate portal page.

The affiliate portal is where your partners go to register, log in, grab their links, and track their performance. Solid Affiliate generates it with a simple shortcode, and you can split the registration and login forms onto separate pages if you prefer a cleaner experience. The registration form is customizable to a degree—you can toggle fields like first name, last name, and payment email—but there's no option to add fully custom fields. If you needed to ask affiliates something specific during signup, like their monthly traffic numbers, you'd be out of luck for now.

One important tip: don't just send potential affiliates straight to a bare registration form. Take a page from companies like Jasper, which build dedicated landing pages that sell the benefits of their affiliate program—commissions, bonuses, audience alignment, and the value of the product itself. Build a compelling case for why someone should promote your products, then funnel them into the registration flow.

Once someone applies, you'll get an email notification and can review their application in the WordPress dashboard. Solid Affiliate lets you require manual approval before affiliates can start promoting, which is strongly recommended. You want to vet applicants to ensure they won't spam their lists, run competing PPC campaigns against your brand keywords, or otherwise tarnish your reputation. Approved affiliates automatically receive a notification email that you can customize with merge tags.

Setting Up Referral Rates and Commission Structures

Solid Affiliate defaults to a 20% commission rate, but the real power of the plugin lies in how granular you can get with your rate structure. The general recommendation is to be as generous as possible—think about what you're already spending on PPC or Facebook ads to acquire a customer, and pay your affiliates at least that much. Higher commissions mean more motivated affiliates, and since you only pay on actual sales, the risk is minimal.

At the global level, you can set a default percentage or flat-rate commission. But the flexibility goes much deeper than that. You can override the rate on a per-affiliate basis, which is perfect for rewarding your top performers or honoring special arrangements. You can also set rates on a per-product basis directly in the WooCommerce product editor—useful when you sell a mix of high-margin digital products and lower-margin physical goods. You can even disable commissions entirely on specific products where there's no margin to share.

For more advanced setups, Solid Affiliate supports affiliate groups (think tiers like Basic, Pro, and Elite) where each group gets a different commission rate. The one limitation here is that moving affiliates between groups is a manual process—there's no automated tier progression based on sales volume, which would be a welcome addition. Finally, there's a per-product-per-affiliate rate option, and it includes an "auto referral" toggle that awards the commission regardless of whether the customer clicked an affiliate link. This is particularly useful for joint ventures where an influencer helped create a product and deserves a cut of every sale.

Other important settings to configure include cookie expiration (defaulting to 30 days, though you can extend this based on your sales cycle), the referral grace period (set this to at least double your return policy to avoid paying commissions on refunded orders), and options to exclude shipping and tax from commission calculations. Solid Affiliate uses last-click attribution, meaning the affiliate whose link was clicked most recently before purchase gets the credit—a model that rewards whoever actually closed the deal.

How Affiliate Tracking and Sales Attribution Works

Once your affiliate program is live, Solid Affiliate handles tracking through two primary mechanisms: link-based cookie tracking and coupon code attribution. When someone clicks an affiliate link, a cookie is placed in their browser that persists for the duration you've configured. If that visitor makes a purchase within the cookie window, the affiliate gets credit.

Coupon-based tracking is arguably even more important as privacy restrictions tighten across the web. You can create WooCommerce coupons and associate them with specific affiliate IDs. Anytime that coupon code is used at checkout, the corresponding affiliate receives commission credit regardless of whether any link was clicked. This is a fair approach that protects affiliates from losing commissions due to ad blockers, privacy-focused browsers, or customers who simply type your URL directly after hearing about you from an affiliate's content.

The affiliate dashboard gives partners a clear view of their performance: total referrals, visit counts, earnings, and payout history. There's also a built-in link builder so affiliates can generate tracked URLs for any page on your site—not just the homepage or product pages. This feature comes standard with Solid Affiliate, whereas it's typically an add-on with competing plugins like AffiliateWP.

On the admin side, every referral is logged with full detail. You can see which products were included in each order, which items had custom commission rates, and which were excluded entirely. Order notes in WooCommerce also reference the associated referral, making it straightforward to audit the data and ensure everything is calculating correctly.

Paying Your Affiliates

When it comes time to pay your affiliates, Solid Affiliate provides two paths: manual export or automated PayPal bulk payments. The manual route generates a CSV file with all the payment details, which you can then process through whatever payment method you prefer—checks, Stripe transfers, bank wires, or anything else.

For a more streamlined approach, Solid Affiliate integrates directly with PayPal's bulk payout system. You connect your PayPal account, select the affiliates you want to pay (filtered by date range and the grace period you've configured), and process everything in one batch. The plugin keeps a history of past bulk payouts so you always have a record of what's been paid and when.

The filtering options are practical. You can limit payouts to referrals older than your grace period threshold, which ensures you're never paying out commissions on orders that might still be refunded. You can also set custom date ranges for monthly, quarterly, or whatever payment schedule works for your business.

Final Verdict: Who Should Use Solid Affiliate?

Solid Affiliate punches well above its weight for a plugin at this price point. The interface is clean and intuitive, the documentation is thorough for such a young product, and the core functionality—affiliate registration, flexible commission structures, link and coupon tracking, and payout management—all work reliably.

There are some areas where it could improve. An export function for affiliate data is conspicuously absent, which is a concern if you ever need to migrate to another platform. WP Fusion integration would dramatically expand its utility by connecting to virtually any email marketing or CRM platform, rather than the current Mailchimp-only integration. Automated tier progression for affiliate groups and support for custom registration fields would also round out the feature set nicely.

If you're running a WooCommerce store and want to launch an affiliate program without committing to a $300/year subscription, Solid Affiliate is a compelling option. It covers the essentials with a level of polish and reliability that's rare among budget-friendly affiliate plugins. Just be aware of its WooCommerce-only limitation—if you need broader platform support or deep third-party integrations, AffiliateWP remains the more versatile (and more expensive) choice.

Watch the Full Video

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