Running a coupon site
Not everyone who uses Cashback Tracker is running a cashback programme.
Plenty of sites use it purely for coupons: shop pages, affiliate codes, a searchable directory of merchants. There is no cashback to pay out, no member balances, and no intention of ever having any. For those sites, every mention of cashback on the front end is a promise the site cannot keep — and worse, it is the promise Google indexes.
One setting turns all of it off.
Turning it off
Go to Cashback Tracker → Settings → General and set Cashback features to Disabled.
That is the whole thing. There is no wizard and nothing to confirm, because nothing is deleted.
What stops
Everything a visitor could read as an offer of cashback:
Shop tiles no longer show a cashback rate.
Shop pages no longer show the cashback box, the average approval time, or the cashback figure that some themes float over the "Go to shop" button.
The member area —
[cashback-account],[cashback-balance]and the Balance block — renders nothing at all.Payout requests and referrals are unavailable, and the referral tab disappears.
Emails to members are not sent.
The shop directory heading reads "Shops" rather than "Cashback shops".
Search engine descriptions for shop pages describe coupons rather than cashback.
Visitors are no longer asked to register before they leave for the shop. On a cashback site that step exists so the sale can be credited to somebody. Here there is nobody to credit, so it is only friction.
What keeps working
Everything that earns you money.
Your tracking links. This is the important one. Coupon sites and cashback sites monetise in exactly the same way — the difference is that a coupon site keeps the whole commission rather than sharing part of it with a member. Every link still carries your affiliate ID.
Shops, shop pages, shop categories and shop search.
Coupons: importing them, editing them, the coupon list on each shop page, coupon votes.
Ratings and reviews.
Your Orders and Networks screens, so you can still see the commissions you have earned.
What appears instead
Three things fill the space cashback used to occupy:
A coupon count on each shop tile, where the rate used to be — "8 coupons". A shop with none shows nothing, exactly as a shop with no cashback rate shows nothing today.
A Top offer box on the shop page, in place of the cashback box. It shows that shop's first coupon, with its code or its deal button.
A "Most coupons" sort in the shop directory, where "Highest cashback" used to be.
Shop page titles
New shop pages are titled "Nike Coupons" instead of "Nike Cashback".
This applies only to pages created from now on. Pages you already have keep their titles, deliberately — they are already indexed by search engines, and quietly rewriting hundreds of published titles is not something a display setting should do on your behalf.
If you want to change the pattern for future pages, or you had already customised it, it is under Cashback Tracker → Settings → General → Title of advertiser page. To rename pages you already have, edit them as you would any other WordPress page.
Changing your mind
Set it back to Enabled and everything returns exactly as it was.
Nothing is deleted when you turn cashback off. Rates, balances, payout history and referral records all stay in the database untouched — they simply stop being displayed. This is worth knowing if you are only experimenting, or if you switch it off and later decide to add a cashback programme after all.
If you upgraded from an earlier version 3 release, read this.
The old Cashback section setting described itself as a way to "create a coupon website without cashback features", but it only hid the cashback box on shop pages. That setting is now this one, and it finally does what it always said.
If you had it on Disabled and you genuinely run a coupon site, this is the fix arriving and there is nothing to do.
If you had it on Disabled while actually running a cashback programme — some themes display cashback their own way, so a few people used it to avoid showing the box twice — set it back to Enabled after updating. Your members' balances are untouched and will reappear immediately.
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