Setup and getting started

What integrations does Siren support?

Siren works with WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, LifterLMS, LearnDash, NorthCommerce, and Gravity Forms. All of these ship with both the Lite and Essentials tiers, so there’s no extra purchase required to use any of them. As long as the supported plugin is active on your WordPress site, Siren detects it and turns on the matching features automatically.

Not every integration supports every feature. Refunds, coupon tracking, and renewal handling vary depending on what each commerce plugin exposes. The integration feature matrix has a side-by-side comparison so you can see exactly which features apply to the plugin you’re using.

How many sites can I install Siren on?

That depends on which tier you buy. Each price point allows a different number of activations, and you can review the current options on the pricing page. If you outgrow your tier later, you can upgrade and pick up the additional sites without losing any of your existing data.

Do I need a developer to set up Siren?

No. Siren is built so a non-technical store owner can install it, pick a recipe, and start running an affiliate program the same afternoon. Recipes are pre-built configurations that create programs, program groups, and distributors with sensible defaults, so you don’t have to understand every concept before you can launch.

That said, Siren is also extensible from top to bottom if you do have a developer. The whole system is event-driven, which means custom triggers, custom incentive structures, and integrations with other tools are all possible without forking the plugin.

What’s the difference between Lite and Essentials?

Lite is the free tier and covers the core affiliate workflow: tracking referrals, creating conversions, and paying out commissions. Essentials unlocks the more advanced features like coupon tracking, distributors (scheduled payouts based on aggregate performance), and the full set of program structures. Both tiers include every commerce integration, so the difference is about how much of Siren’s reward modeling you can use, not which platforms you can connect.

Can I use Siren without WordPress?

Not directly. Siren is a WordPress plugin, and it relies on WordPress and its commerce integrations for everything from order detection to user management. If you don’t run WordPress, Siren isn’t the right fit today.

Concepts

What’s the difference between a program and a distributor?

A program is tied to a single transaction. A customer buys something, the program matches that sale to a collaborator, and an obligation gets created right away. Affiliate commissions, sales commissions, and product royalties all fit this shape.

A distributor is tied to a schedule instead of a transaction. It tracks aggregate performance over a period of time (a month, a quarter, whatever you set) and then pays out based on that performance when the period ends. Profit shares, monthly bonuses, and “top performer wins” structures all use distributors. If you can’t tie the reward to one specific sale, you probably want a distributor.

What’s a program group and when do I need one?

A program group bundles overlapping programs together so that only one of them pays out per conversion. The classic example is tiered commission rates. If you want top affiliates to earn 20% and everyone else to earn 10%, you’d put both programs in a group so a top affiliate gets paid the higher rate instead of getting paid twice.

You only need a program group when programs overlap. If your programs cover entirely different products or audiences, they can run side by side without one. Siren’s default behavior is to pay every program it can, and a group is the way to override that when you specifically don’t want it.

Can a collaborator be in multiple programs at once?

Yes. A single collaborator can be enrolled in any number of programs and distributors at the same time, and a single conversion can fire multiple programs. If an affiliate refers a customer who buys a book, Siren can pay both the affiliate and the book’s author from the same sale without any extra configuration.

What happens if multiple collaborators contributed to a sale?

Each program has a program structure that decides who gets credit when more than one collaborator is in the running. Some structures pay only the most recent referrer. Others pay the first one. Some divide the reward proportionally based on engagement scores, and others split it evenly. You pick the structure that matches how you want to attribute credit, and Siren handles the rest.

Tracking and attribution

How does Siren track who referred a customer?

Siren uses three signals. The first is a tracking cookie set when someone clicks a referral link. The second is a tracking ID that can be passed through URL parameters (handy for situations where cookies are unreliable). The third is coupon codes, where the discount code itself acts as the attribution signal at checkout. When a customer converts, Siren looks at all of these signals and creates engagements for whichever collaborators match.

What if a customer clears their cookies?

Cookies are the easiest tracking signal to lose. If a customer clicks a referral link, leaves, comes back a week later through a search engine, and then buys, the original cookie may already be gone. The safety net is manual attribution. An admin can credit any transaction to a collaborator after the fact, and Siren runs the same pipeline it would have run automatically. There’s a step-by-step guide for doing this from the WordPress admin or via the REST API.

Can affiliates use coupon codes instead of links?

Yes. Coupon code tracking lets a collaborator promote your products with a discount code instead of (or alongside) a referral link. You create the coupon in your commerce plugin the way you normally would, then assign it to a collaborator through the field Siren adds to the coupon edit screen. When a customer applies the code at checkout, Siren attributes the sale to the right person automatically.

This is especially useful for podcast sponsorships, printed materials, and social media posts where a memorable code outperforms a clickable link. Coupon tracking is supported on WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, LifterLMS, and NorthCommerce.

What if Siren misses a sale entirely?

You can still credit the collaborator after the fact. Siren has two tools for this. If the transaction already exists (the order went through, but no one got attributed), use manual attribution to assign credit to the right collaborator. If the transaction doesn’t exist at all (a phone order, an in-person sale, a one-off invoice), you can create the transaction manually and attribute it from there.

Does Siren handle refunds automatically?

Yes. When an order is refunded, cancelled, failed, or trashed in your commerce plugin, Siren listens for that status change and automatically reverses the affiliate records tied to that order. Conversions get rejected, and any obligations that haven’t been paid out yet get rejected too. The full breakdown is in how refunds work.

Are partial refunds supported?

Not currently. Siren treats refunds as all-or-nothing at the transaction level. If the commerce plugin signals a full refund, Siren reverses the whole conversion. If it’s a partial refund and the order status doesn’t change, Siren leaves the records alone. There’s more detail (and the workaround for handling partial refunds manually) in how refunds work.

Payments and operations

How do I pay my collaborators?

When you’re ready to pay out, you create a fulfillment that tallies what each collaborator is owed across all of their approved obligations. From there, you can export the list as a CSV to feed into your payment processor of choice, or you can mark obligations as paid manually if you’ve already sent the money another way. The full walkthrough lives in the paying collaborators guide.

Does Siren actually send the payments?

No. Siren is the system of record for who’s owed what, but it doesn’t move money. You handle the actual transfer through your bank, PayPal, Wise, ACH, or whatever else you use, and then mark the payouts as complete in Siren. This keeps Siren focused on tracking and accounting instead of becoming a payment processor.

What payment methods does Siren accept for buying the plugin itself?

Siren accepts payment methods compatible with Stripe, which includes all major credit cards. We don’t currently accept PayPal.

Subscriptions and scale

Does Siren support recurring referrals?

Yes. If a referred customer buys a subscription product, Siren can pay the collaborator on each renewal as well as the initial sale. WooCommerce-based stores need the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin for this to work, and Easy Digital Downloads stores need the EDD Recurring Payments extension. LifterLMS handles renewals natively. The integration feature matrix shows exactly which integrations support renewals.

How many collaborators can Siren handle?

There isn’t a hard limit baked into the plugin. Siren stores collaborators, engagements, conversions, and obligations as standard WordPress records, which means the practical ceiling depends on your hosting environment more than on Siren itself. Stores running into the thousands of collaborators have reported running Siren without issue on reasonable hosting.

Where can I get help if I’m stuck?

The documentation is the first stop for setup and concept questions. If you’d rather ask a question in plain language, Beacon is an AI assistant that knows the entire Siren docs library and can walk you through configuration questions, recipe selection, and troubleshooting. If you still need a human, the contact form on the site reaches the team directly.