AffiliateWP is a WordPress plugin for running your own affiliate program. Andrew Munro and Pippin Williamson built it in 2014 for their own products. AffiliateWP runs on your own site, so you own your affiliate data and your affiliate relationships, and no affiliate network takes a percentage of your sales.
Why we built it
AffiliateWP started with a problem we had ourselves. We ran the affiliate program for Easy Digital Downloads on an existing WordPress plugin, and it kept getting commission amounts wrong. When the tool you pay people with can’t work out what they’ve earned, you stop trusting your own reports.
So we built a replacement and launched it in April 2014. We were its first customers, which meant it had to get every commission right, keep the data on our own site and make paying affiliates take minutes instead of an afternoon.
Since then, AffiliateWP has grown to pay affiliates abroad in their own currency, flag suspicious referrals and schedule payouts, and we still run our own affiliate program on it today.
Who AffiliateWP is for
More than 30,000 business owners use AffiliateWP to run their own affiliate program rather than hand it to someone else. Most run WooCommerce stores, and many sell courses, memberships and subscriptions, where affiliates can earn commission on renewals as well as first sales.
There are a few cases where it isn’t the right tool, though. If you want a ready-made pool of affiliates, and someone else to manage them for you, an affiliate network is a better fit. If your store isn’t on WordPress, AffiliateWP can’t help you. And if you’re an affiliate managing the links you earn commission on, you want a link management plugin instead.
Who makes AffiliateWP
AffiliateWP is part of Awesome Motive, the company behind WPBeginner, OptinMonster, WPForms and MonsterInsights. It joined Awesome Motive in 2021 with the rest of Sandhills Development’s WordPress products, and Sandhills Development, LLC is the Awesome Motive company that operates it.
Andrew Munro, co-founder. Andrew has built affiliate and referral software for WordPress since 2014.
Core values
In work or play, private or public, these are the values that guide us:
We put people first, always.
We do the right thing every time.
We fight for our customers’ success.
We commit to excellence by paying attention to details.
We labor for simplicity.