What changed in version 3

A summary of what is different from version 2. For the upgrade itself, follow Upgrading from version 2.

Version 2 tracked cashback. Version 3 runs a cashback programme: it keeps the balances, handles payout requests, gives members somewhere to log in and look, and pays referral bonuses. Most of what follows exists because of that shift.

Read this first

The myCred money mirror is gone

Version 2 could mirror approved cashback into myCred points, and members spent points. Version 3 accounts for cashback in its own ledger and nowhere else.

• Points your members already hold stay in myCred and remain spendable there. Cashback Tracker stops adding to them.

• There is nothing to migrate and nothing to reconcile.

• myCred and GamiPress are now gamification only — badges, ranks and engagement rewards, with amounts you set yourself.

The ledger asks you two permanent questions

On the first admin page load after the upgrade you choose a site currency and what to do with your existing order history. Both are difficult to undo, and a site that previously paid in myCred points must answer the second one a particular way. Upgrading from version 2 covers both.

The shop card was redesigned

[cashback-shops] grids draw the new directory card. Themes with their own copy of the template are unaffected; sites that only styled .cbtrkr_grid_item will see the change.

New in version 3

Money and members

• A cashback ledger — an append-only record of every change to every member's balance.

• Pending, available and paid balances, with a configurable holding period between approval and availability.

• A member area with a dashboard, cashback history, payouts and referrals.

• Payout requests, with payout methods you define and a minimum you set. You still send the money yourself; the plugin records it.

• Referrals — bonuses for both sides, an ongoing share of a referred member's cashback, and qualifying rules that stop people farming the bonus.

• Manual adjustments, for goodwill payments and corrections.

Networks

• Postbacks — networks can notify your site the moment a sale happens instead of waiting for the next import.

• A custom network builder, for networks with no built-in module.

• Shop status policies — decide what happens to a shop page when a shop is paused, rejects you, or disappears from the network's list. See When a shop is paused, rejected or disappears.

• Visible shop loading. Switching a network on starts loading its shops straight away, and the Networks screen shows how far it has got, what it last did, and anything it could not read. See Loading shops from a network.

Storefront

• A shop directory with archive pages, category archives, search, filters and paging.

• Ratings and reviews on shop pages.

• Blocks for the block editor: shops, coupons, shop search and member balance.

• A rebuilt admin, with an overview dashboard and screens for orders, payouts, networks, coupons, referrals and members.

Content

• AI writing for shop descriptions, meta descriptions, SEO titles, taglines and coupon text, using your own API key. Nothing is charged per word by us.

• Bulk generation across many shops or coupons at once, with a cap you set.

• SEO metadata that cooperates with Yoast SEO, Rank Math, SEOPress and The SEO Framework. Their fields always win; Cashback Tracker reads them and never writes over them.

• Translations — the admin is translatable again, which it was not for part of version 2's life.

Changed

• Coupons — import, storage and display were all reworked. An automatic import now removes coupons the network has stopped sending; coupons you added by hand are never touched. See Importing coupons.

• Settings are split across General, Coupons, Member area and AI, plus one page per network.

• Currency — all cashback is converted into a single site currency, with manual exchange-rate overrides if you need them.

• One word for a shop. The admin used to say "advertiser" in some places and "shop" in others for the same thing. It now says shop everywhere. Two menus were renamed: Cashback shops is now Shops, and Advertisers is now Shop catalog. Nothing moved and no data changed — see The Shop catalog.

• Shop lists load in the background in small batches instead of one long request, so a large network no longer times out part-way through, and a refresh that is interrupted picks up where it left off. A refresh that fails to read some shops now leaves your shop list alone rather than treating those shops as gone.

• A warning when scheduled tasks stop running. If your site's scheduler breaks, nothing updates in the background and previously the only sign was data going stale. See Scheduled tasks.

Requirements

Version 3 needs WordPress 7.0 or later and PHP 8.0 or later. Check both before upgrading.