WooCommerce cannot create affiliate links on its own. It can display your products, process orders, and handle all the other core e-commerce tasks, but it does not have the capabilities required to implement an affiliate marketing program, including generating affiliate links.

To do this, you’ll need to install an affiliate marketing plugin.

What Makes a WooCommerce Affiliate Link Different?

A normal product link sends someone to a product page.

An affiliate link does the same thing, but it also identifies the affiliate who sent the visitor. That identifier is usually added to the URL as a referral parameter. For example, a referral link might look like this:

https://yourstore.com/?ref=affiliateID

When someone clicks the link, the affiliate plugin records the visit and associates it with the affiliate. If that visitor later places an order, the plugin connects the sale to that affiliate and calculates the commission.

Without that tracking layer, the link is just a regular URL. It may send traffic to your store, but it won’t tell you who referred the customer or how much commission they should earn.

Why WooCommerce Needs an Affiliate Plugin

A WooCommerce affiliate plugin provides the missing functionality required to run an affiliate marketing program, including:

• Affiliate registration and approval
• Unique referral link generation
• Click and conversion tracking
• Commission rules
• WooCommerce order attribution
• Affiliate dashboards
• Store owner reporting
• Payout management

The most important part is order attribution. If a referred customer buys something from your store, the plugin needs to connect that purchase to the right affiliate and the right WooCommerce order.

Creating Affiliate Links With Solid Affiliate

For WooCommerce stores, we recommend Solid Affiliate.

Solid Affiliate is built specifically for WooCommerce, so it can generate affiliate links and tie them directly to WooCommerce orders. It also lets you manage affiliates, referrals, commissions, reports, and payouts from inside WordPress.

The setup process is straightforward:

1. Install Solid Affiliate.
2. Configure your affiliate program settings.
3. Add or approve affiliates.
4. Let Solid Affiliate generate referral links.
5. Give affiliates access to their portal, where they can obtain their links.
6. Track referrals and commissions as orders come in.

Here is a quick look at the Affiliate Portal:

From here, they can copy their link and use it in blog posts, product reviews, email campaigns, landing pages, social media posts, or anywhere else they promote your products.

Creating Links to Specific Product Pages

In many cases, affiliates will not want to send every visitor to your homepage. They may want to link directly to a specific product, category, landing page, or promotional page.

A good affiliate plugin should make this easy.

With Solid Affiliate, affiliates can use the URL generator to create referral links for specific pages on your site. For example, if they want to promote one WooCommerce product, they can enter that product page URL and generate an affiliate version of it.

This gives affiliates more flexibility. Instead of sharing only a general store link, they can send visitors directly to the most relevant page.

Using Custom Affiliate Slugs

Some affiliate links use numeric IDs. Others use custom slugs.

A numeric referral link might look like this:

https://yourstore.com/?ref=123

A custom slug might look more like this:

https://yourstore.com/?ref=sarah

Custom slugs can make links easier to read, remember, and share. They can also look cleaner when affiliates include them in emails, videos, podcasts, or social media posts.

Solid Affiliate supports custom affiliate slugs, which gives affiliates more control over how their links appear:

Make Sure the Link Connects to Real Orders

Creating the affiliate link is only the first step.

The plugin also needs to track what happens after someone clicks the link. If the visitor places an order, the referral should be connected to the actual WooCommerce order. If the order is refunded, canceled, or changed, the related commission should be adjusted according to your settings.

This is why WooCommerce integration is so important. Affiliate links are only useful if the data behind them is accurate.

A strong WooCommerce affiliate plugin should understand order totals, discounts, refunds, coupons, product details, and order statuses. Otherwise, you may have to review referrals manually or fix commission records yourself.

Designed specifically for WooCommerce, Solid Affiliate handles all these issues seamlessly.

Final Thoughts

How can you create an affiliate link on WooCommerce?

Simple. Install a WooCommerce affiliate plugin, approve your affiliates, and let the plugin not only generate trackable referral links for them but also manage all the other affiliate program tasks.

For most WooCommerce stores, Solid Affiliate is the best option to do this because it was built for WooCommerce and keeps the entire affiliate link workflow inside WordPress.

To explore other options, see The 6 Best WooCommerce Affiliate Plugins.