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Items not displaying for affiliates under referral tab
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by
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.
Posted in Affiliates Enterprise
Comments
4 responses to “Items not displaying for affiliates under referral tab”
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
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