External / Affiliate products are not as commonly used as other types of product in WooCommerce. However, it’s a bless that WooCommerce supports this special type of product.
Under many circumstances, you may want to redirect customers to other sites that sell the products, and you will need to create external / affiliate products for this purpose.
External / affiliate products cannot be added to cart, purchased, and shipped from your site. Instead, customers will click the link to visit another website where they can buy the product. Imagine if you own many sites but the products are only sold in the shopping site, or if you are part of an affiliate programme.
The main focus of this article is to show how you can create external / affiliate products in WooCommerce admin.
If you choose External / Affiliate product type, you will see that Shipping settings disppear:
On the General settings, you need to fill in the Product URL – the page you want to redirect customers to where they can buy the product.
Note that if you join an affiliate program, make sure you put here the affiliated link, so you can get the affiliate commission when customers click and buy from your link.
Product description and information, CTA button and pricing fields show just like other products, except that CTA button will redirect customers to the product URL that you set.
You can easily set inventory, attributes, linked products, and advanced options as for other products.
However, in linked products, no cross-sells can be created because there is no cart page for external / affiliate products (cross-sells only show on cart page). You can only create upsells that show right on the product pages.
A few side notes for external / affiliate products in WooCommerce:
- Customers can add external/ affiliate products to wishlist just like other products. You can enable this feature by using Wishlist plugins such as YITH WooCommerce Wishlist or WooCommerce Wishlist Plugin.
- You can track click conversion for external / affiliate product links by integrating with Google Analytics. Check this tutorial out.
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