Why Should You Upgrade to Coupon Affiliates Pro?

There are a lot of good reasons for WooCommerce websites to use a plugin that helps them to manage their affiliate program.

Those reasons primarily boil down to the fact that it saves time. Manually inserting and tracking affiliate links, not to mention managing sub-affiliates, is a nightmare at any kind of real volume.

But are their reasons to upgrade that plugin to the paid version?

This is the question that we’ll examine, using Coupon Affiliates as an example. The free version of the plugin is perfectly functional and helpful, of course. But is there a reason to pay for ‘Pro’ features?

Let’s find out!

How Much Time Do You Save With Coupon Affiliates Pro?

The saying ‘time is money’ might be trite, but it’s also true. Unless you literally have nothing better to do with your time, automation of repetitive tasks can allow you to focus on ways to better manage and grow your business.

When you’re just starting out and have little to no referral volume, you aren’t going to save a lot of time by upgrading to Coupon Affiliates Pro. But as soon as you start making over $100 a month, you’re likely to save two to three hours of admin, minimum, with Coupon Affiliates Pro features. And that figure only goes up as your affiliate activity grows.

What Are the Big Time Saving Features of Coupon Affiliates Pro?

Firstly, let’s look at some of the common automation tasks that are part of Coupon Affiliates Pro that aren’t included in the free version:

• Commission Payout Requests: Rather than manually calculate affiliate payments and track the status of payouts, Coupon Affiliate Pro can automatically handle unpaid commission and payout requests. You can also set it up to submit payout requests automatically for affiliates who haven’t made a manual request at regular intervals (weekly, monthly, etc.).

• Commission Payments: Instead of having to manually pay your affiliates, with the Pro version, you can easily pay affiliates commission in one-click, via Stripe, PayPal or Store Credit. You can even enable “automatic payouts” which will automatically attempt to complete payouts, as soon as request is made.

• Referral Link Generation: By providing resources that allows your affiliates to quickly and easily share their own affiliate links and campaigns on the fly, you won’t have to field any custom requests or create any new campaign links for them.

• Short URL and QR Code Generation: Similarly, any kind of real world ads are far easier to implement with short URLs or QR codes. But with Coupon Affiliates Pro, you won’t have to generate any of that for them manually. Affiliates will be able to do that on their own via their dashboard.

• Auto New User Registration and Approvals: You can set up your own custom vetting process with the Pro version, and if new affiliates or sub-affiliates qualify, you can have the system automatically onboard them. Additionally, in the Pro version you can add your own custom fields, to easily collect all the information from your affiliates. Learn More.

• Automate Affiliate Tools & Resources: The system can automatically send emails to affiliates, give them access to their dashboard, marketing resources (creatives), and allow them to manage payouts, URLs, and account settings all by themselves.

• Automate Personalized Creatives: The dynamic creatives functionality allows for the automatic generation of personalized creatives for each affiliate using merge tags. You can therefore automatically tailor the creatives to each affiliate, saving you time from having to create unique creatives for each affiliate.

Is this automation worth it?

To decide whether or not this automation is worthwhile, estimate how many hours of work it will save you per month and divide the result by $10. If the final number is less than what your time is worth per hour, you’re going to benefit from this automation.

For example: Let’s say that the automation listed above saves you 4 hours of work every month. A yearly Coupon Affiliate’s Pro subscription costs just $10 a month. Therefore if your time is worth more than $2.50 an hour, it’s worth upgrading to Pro in this scenario.

However if it only saves you a fraction of that amount of time, 20 minutes a month for example, then you might want to stick with the free version of Coupon Affiliates until your business scales to the volume where you require these kinds of automations. Eventually it will become worthwhile if you’re seeing some level of success.

Reporting & Analytics

The other area where Coupon Affiliates Pro might present some value to you is in the area of reporting. Some of the useful reporting features in the paid version that aren’t available in the free version include:

• Affiliate Payout PDFs: You can generate professional looking payout statements automatically for each affiliate, in an easily printable or achievable PDF format.

• Monthly Email Digests: Automatic generation and sending of monthly affiliate activity reports shows that you’re interested in each affiliate’s current status and future success.

• Advanced Admin Reports: Quickly and easily generate admin reports for a detailed analysis of all the most important statistics for your affiliate program. This can be filtered by a certain date range, and also includes several other filters to tailor the report exactly to your requirements.

• Export Order Tables to Excel: By enabling the export of each affiliates’ “monthly summary” and “recent orders” tables to an Excel spreadsheet, you’ll make their lives (and taxes) far easier. If they don’t have Excel, they can import it into Google Sheets too.

These and other enhanced analytics reports can save both you and your sub-affiliates a lot of time. For most people, if you spend over 1-2 hours a month creating, generating, and analyzing reports about your WooCommerce affiliate network, it’s worth investing in Coupon Affiliates Pro.

Some Final Thoughts on Whether or Not You Should Upgrade

A good rule of thumb is that you should leverage the free features as much as possible until you break the $100 a month barrier. Your manual reporting and maintenance tasks are likely to be less than one to two hours a month, and you’ll want to save every penny at first.

But as soon as you hit three figures, spending $10 a month on an annual subscription is a no-brainer. For most people, it will save them at least an hour a month that they could be using to grow and enhance their affiliate activities. And valuing your time at under $10 an hour isn’t the way you grow a successful business.

And that’s also the point where you’re going to want the final perk of Coupon Affiliates Pro: Priority support. If you need help tweaking and customizing your WooCommerce affiliate program, being in the priority support queue is a lifesaver. That alone is worth the $10 a month annual subscription to many businesses.

Bill Ricardi

Bill Ricardi is a former Silicon Valley sysadmin, and uTest’s 2010 Performance Tester of the Year. He was test manager for Deloitte before becoming a full time author in 2017, and is also a regular contributor to the Coupon Affiliates blog.