Hi team,
I recently upgraded from Affiliates Pro to Affiliates Enterprise, hoping to provide better insights and transparency for my top affiliates. However, one of my main affiliates has reported that she still cannot see what products are being purchased through her referral links (this was also the case on Affiliates Pro).
From her dashboard, when navigating to Referrals, she only sees:
– Date (I assume this is the transaction date, not the completion date)
– Amount
– Status (but this only displays “paid” – it does not show any pending orders: can it show pending too?)
– Item (this field is blank for every referral – just em-dashes appear)
I was expecting that with Affiliates Enterprise, the items purchased would be listed here, along with any pending orders still awaiting payment or confirmation. Without this visibility, my affiliates are repeatedly reaching out to ask what was purchased so they can better promote those products – creating unnecessary back-and-forth on something that should already be visible to them.
I’m trying to determine if this is:
– A software bug (items and pending orders should appear but aren’t), or
– A configuration issue on my end (maybe there’s a setting or toggle I’ve missed?)
If needed, I can share screenshots from the affiliate’s dashboard to help demonstrate the issue.
Thanks in advance for your help! I’d really like to offer my affiliates a more complete view of their performance.
Comments
9 responses to “Items not displaying for affiliates under referral tab”
You’re welcome Ian and many thanks for your feedback!
Your reasoning is correct because the referrals and their orders are there, but there are several complications included in such an updating process. Since we are talking about a bulk update, it first needs to loop through each order and each of its items. With the items in place, it needs to relate each item value with the referral commission after looping through each one of your existing rates, in order to estimate the possible item involved in the referral. However, if this fails, ie the applicable rate has changed or has been deleted, then it might even be impossible to find out which item did the commission apply to. Adding to that, if you have an order with more than one items with the same value, then obviously this estimate will fail. Also, if you are using an extended set of rates, where the same product has a different rate for each affiliate, then the affiliate id needs to be added in the equation too, assuming again that your rates and affiliates’ ids persisted all these years.
I tried to keep out several technical terms from this description and at the same time, present how the situation is at the moment, hope it makes sense to you.
IMO, what you should do is to keep an eye on your installation and in case this situation re-occurs, then make sure to drop us a comment. Unless there’s no relation to your setup, what you need to be aware of, is to avoid any kind of optimization plugins and especially those claiming to optimize your database. The reason behind that, is because such plugins can delete your data without your noticing.
Kind regards,
George
Hey Ian,
You’re welcome, I’m glad that after adding the custom addon you can see the desired referral statuses according to your affiliates’ requirements.
As for the items, these are included in the recorded referrals regardless of the Affiliates edition, Pro or Enterprise. What might make a difference is if Affiliates Pro version was pretty deprecated in your installation, aka lower than 3.0.0. Other than this, another possibility is if Affiliates WooCommerce Integration version was lower than 2.0.0, or simply if you were using Affiliates WooCommerce Integration Light, that doesn’t support items by default.
What you mention here is correct, if the data has been recorded then you can find it under Affiliates > Referrals, if you Expand data and Expand items. If it isn’t, then your best option would be to add it manually for each referral.
Hope it helps you.
Kind regards,
George
Thanks so much for the quick reply, George — really appreciate the clarification.
I went back and checked one of our pre-upgrade backups just to confirm, and at the time we were using:
Affiliates Pro version 4.19.0
Affiliates WooCommerce Integration version 4.0.0
So both were pretty up-to-date (definitely not deprecated) before we made the move to Enterprise. We were also using the full integration, not the Light version, which is why it’s a bit puzzling that none of the referral items were captured during that time on Pro (we’ve been using it since 2016).
I understand now that if the items weren’t recorded in the first place, then there may not be a simple way to recover that data. That said, since the referral records are still associated with the original WooCommerce orders (their statuses do update when the orders are completed), I’m wondering if there might be any way to script a batch process that attempts to pull the item data from those original orders and populate it into the missing referral item fields?
I completely understand if that’s not currently built-in, or if it would be too complex to implement broadly, but if there were any way to automate this for existing records (instead of manually editing thousands of historical referrals), it would be hugely helpful for transparency and reporting not just going forward, but historically for our affiliates.
If no such workaround exists, we can live with it and are glad to see everything working properly on new referrals now — but just wanted to ask, in case there’s a possible fix that could save a LOT (like weeks) of manual work.
Thanks again for all your support and the thoughtful responses throughout this process!
With gratitude,
Ian
First off, huge thank you for the patch plugin! it worked perfectly to show pending and rejected statuses in the affiliate dashboard, and our affiliates are really happy to finally have that visibility!!! Amazing!! 😀
What that change also helped reveal is that items are now showing on referrals created after our upgrade from Affiliates Pro to Affiliates Enterprise (around mid-June). Until now, we couldn’t see that difference, as none of our affiliates had referrals that were marked as “accepted” or “paid” post-upgrade yet; Only now, with pending visible, is it clear that items are appearing correctly on newer referrals, but still missing (just displayed as dashes) on older referrals that were created under Affiliates Pro.
So to summarize:
– Affiliates Pro referrals (pre-upgrade): items still not displayed
– Affiliates Enterprise referrals (post-upgrade): items are displayed correctly
That strongly suggests the issue was tied to how items were being recorded (or not) under Affiliates Pro.
Question:
Is there any way to retroactively update the older referrals (pre-upgrade) so the item details can be displayed as well? Could this be done via a script or batch update, since the orders and referral relationships still exist?
If helpful, one of our affiliates has offered to share their login so you can see how it looks from their perspective on the live site. I’m also happy to set up a staging site or email the credentials privately if you’d prefer that route.
Thanks again!! I really appreciate your help throughout this thread. Both original issues appear to be resolved for anything new going forward. Now we’re just hoping to get a bit more visibility on the historical data if possible.
Hey Ian,
After doing some additional tests, I wasn’t able to replicate your issue with items not appearing in Referrals section, so I think it would be better to have a look at your site, preferably on a staging clone, if it’s running live at the moment. You may create a temp admin account using my personal email, george at itthinx dot com.
Kind regards,
George
Hey Ian,
Thanks for your reply and for sharing all those details with us. You are more than welcome to disagree with our approach, since every single use case can be unique and requires specific details to apply. Such opinions have always been welcome by the team, because these are all part of the necessary motivation to evolve the product. After all it is built with the purpose to cover as many cases as possible and not being limited to a generic concept. Exactly for that reason the system is robust but also flexible which in turn means that if you download the small plugin I’ve created here, https://github.com/geotsiokos/affiliates-dashboard-referrals-statuses/archive/refs/heads/master.zip and install it on your site, your Referrals section will also include pending, rejected referrals.
The shortcode I mentioned in my previous comment can be omitted, but IMO it’s worth mentioned some more details. The Affiliates Dashboard consists of several different sections and you have the option to either render the whole Dashboard or specific sections of it. Rendering only one section doesn’t mean that the Dashboard is broken, but instead you have the option to render all the sections or each one in its own page.
In other words, when you use the [affiliates_dashboard] shortcode, the referrals will include the additional statuses specified in the custom plugin.
A toggle option would indeed make it easier for you to handle this, but the necessity of this option occurred only after your mention. This of course doesn’t mean that the idea of a backend option is rejected, on the contrary, it’s already been added in my notes for future consideration.
Regarding your second issue, this is something that requires additional research to find out when it can occur, since my two ideas won’t apply to your setup. I’ll have another thorough look and let you know once I have an update.
In the meantime, you can safely reinstall Affiliates WooCommerce integration without risking the persistence of your data. The only way that your affiliate data is wiped, is if you enable the option to Delete all plugin data on deactivation found in Affiliates > Settings > General(tab), near the bottom of this page and then you deactivate Affiliates Enterprise plugin, so it would be better to double check that the option is disabled.
In general, it is always a good practice to take frequent backups of your database and site files.
Kind regards,
George
apologies that my ticket update lost all the line breaks?! – not sure why it posted without them?!
Thanks so much for the thorough and thoughtful reply George! I really appreciate the time you took to break both issues down so clearly.
Regarding the first issue (pending/rejected referrals not showing):
I understand your reasoning for excluding pending and rejected referrals by default, and agree that these statuses can sometimes create confusion if not properly explained. That said, I’d like to (politely) disagree with the assumption that more data causes unnecessary back-and-forth.
In my case, I sell services that are booked well in advance – sometimes as far as a year out, with 2–3 months being average. Orders remain in a “pending” or “processing” status until after the service is actually provided, which means that accepted/paid referrals may not appear for months. As a result, affiliates are left in the dark about their sales performance, sometimes for entire seasons, unless I manually send them reports.
Additionally, having visibility into cancelled or rejected referrals can be valuable for performance analysis. For example, if a specific product is driving clicks and purchases but has a high cancellation rate, it might indicate that the affiliate is unintentionally misrepresenting it in their marketing. I feel no data is bad data – even cancellations are insights. (the same could be said for traditional products that are sold with shorter completion windows).
I appreciate the workaround using [affiliates_dashboard_referrals status='pending,accepted,closed']. In testing, this does show the pending referrals as promised (which is awesome). However, as you probably expected, using that shortcode replaces the full dashboard, which means we lose access to the other key features like:
Overview, Campaigns, Banners, Profile, Visits
This creates a bit of a difficult trade-off. While the referral visibility is valuable, losing the rest of the dashboard functionality would be a major downgrade for affiliates. It feels like a difficult compromise having to choose one or the other (or adding two tables to the page with similar, but slighltly different data).
Since the functionality to display these referral statuses already exists, would it be possible for this to be implemented as a toggle option in the plugin settings? For example:
– Show pending referrals
– Show rejected referrals
This would allow admins to enable additional statuses without breaking the full dashboard experience. I completely understand why you’ve chosen a limited default for clarity, but this would give site owners more flexibility to match their business model and avoid needing to build custom dashboards from individual shortcodes, or using multiple dashboards from the user/affiliate side (which seems more confusing).
If that’s not currently on the roadmap, I’d be happy to explore this as a paid add-on or custom development — though I do think it would be a valuable core feature for many users, and definitely for their affiliates.
*****
Regarding the second issue (items not showing in referral data):
Thanks again for this breakdown. I’ve double-checked everything you mentioned:
I’m not using the WooCommerce Light version – it’s the full version installed via the Integrations tab.
There is no custom template being used under the /affiliates folder in my theme.
The affiliate dashboard page is very basic — just the shortcode and some explanatory text. No Gutenberg blocks, theme elements or styled elements are present. Only itthinx shortcodes and text before and after.
One point of clarification: If I delete and reinstall the Affiliates WooCommerce integration plugin (just that plugin), will it preserve all my existing affiliate records and referral history? We have thousands of referrals logged, and it’s critical that none of that data is lost during the process. If it’s safe to do, I’m happy to test the reinstall to see if it resolves the item visibility issue.
*****
Thanks again — and apologies for combining two issues into one ticket originally. I really love the plugin and recommend it often to colleagues in the ecommerce space. I’d love to find good solutions to both issues and continue building around this tool.
Kind regards,
Ian (happy user of Itthinx affiliates plugin since 2016)
Hi again Ian,
Welcome back to our support forum for Affiliates plugin.
According to your ticket, you are describing two issues the one related to pending referrals not showing up on your Affiliates Referrals Dashboard and the second one related to missing items for each of these referrals.
For the first part, this is actually a design choice to render only Paid and Unpaid referrals. The paid ones are accepted referrals that have been Closed through Affiliates > Totals, whereas the unpaid ones are those that are accepted but not closed. The reason why pending referrals are excluded, is because a pending referral can relate to either a pending order that hasn’t been completed yet, or a referral that you choose to further review before accepting. Let’s assume that pending referrals were also included. Then if you choose to reject them for your own reasons, or simply because the referring order was cancelled, failed etc then you’ll have again a back-and-forth communication with your affiliates. Furthermore, since a pending referral can end up being rejected, makes it an unsafe option for your affiliates to measure their performance. However, you’re not limited to this choice and you can include them according to your requirements, using the following shortcode in a new page:
[affiliates_dashboard_referrals status='pending,accepted,closed']As for the second part, based on your description this can either relate to the integration used, or a custom referrals-entry.php template, overriding the default one, that blocks items from rendering. Rendering referral items for each referral is a feature supported on both premium versions of Affiliates, Pro and Enterprise.
Please check your plugins and if you’re using Affiliates WooCommerce Light version, first deactivate/delete it and then install Affiliates WooCommerce through Affiliates > Settings > Integrations(tab) > WooCommerce. If the integration is correct then proceed and check for any custom templates that might be used in your theme, under affiliates folder. In this case, you can do the necessary adjustments and afterwards make a test purchase on your shop to find out whether the items are rendered or not.
Feel free to follow-up here if additional support is needed with any of these cases.
Kind regards,
George