Refer a Friend lets your existing customers share a referral link with people they know. When a referred friend places a qualifying order, both sides win: the referring customer earns points or a reward, and the friend gets a discount on their first purchase.
You can also enable the feature to be used by guest customers as well!

The rule has two parts. The first part sets what the referring customer earns. The second part sets what the referred friend gets. When a referee places a qualifying order, the referrer earns reward points that start out pending. Those points become usable after the approval period, so you only ever pay out on valid referrals.

Your happiest customers are your best marketers. Refer a Friend turns them into a growth channel, rewarding them for bringing in new shoppers while handing those new shoppers a reason to make their first purchase.

Because points stay pending until the approval period passes, you stay in control of your costs and only reward genuine referrals. Add minimum spend thresholds, monthly caps, and fraud checks, and you have a referral engine that grows your customer base without eating your margin.

The refer-a-friend rule contains two sections: When a referee places a qualifying order, the referrer earns reward points, which are initially pending. These points become usable after the configured approval period, ensuring only valid referrals are rewarded.

The referring member earns either points or a reward each time a successful referral takes place through their link. You can set:

If you'd like to give a reward instead of points, set the reward up before you build the Refer a Friend rule so it's available in the drop-down.

Give referred friends a voucher for their first purchase to boost the chance they convert to a paying customer. You can set:

You can set a maximum discount amount when creating percentage-off vouchers, so the discount never goes over the amount you set no matter how large the order is. For example, if you offer 10% off with a $50 limit, orders over $500 will still only get $50 off. This keeps your costs under control on high-value orders.

You can apply discount combination restrictions to the codes generated through referrals. This controls which codes can be used at the same time, if at all.

The type of code you get depends on how you set up the offer:

If you're on our Custom site solution, you'll need to import the referral codes into the program.

For your existing customers to receive their referral points, both offers need to balance. Follow this equation:

Minimum Spend = Voucher Minimum Spend - Voucher Discount

For example, say the Minimum Spend on the rule is $20. The referred customer needs to spend $20 for the existing customer to earn points. If the Voucher Minimum Spend is also set to $20, then once the new customer applies the Voucher Discount their order total falls below $20, and the existing customer won't be awarded points.

For both sides to balance, the Minimum Spend must be raised to $30, so that when the discount of $10 is applied, the minimum spend for the points for the Referring Customer is met, at $20.

You can restrict referred customers to using the discount only with a specific collection of products. To do this, find the collection in Shopify and paste it into the correct place within the Refer a Friend rule.

You can block referrals where the referring customer and the referred customer share the same Internet Protocol (IP) address.

An IP address is a unique number that identifies a device based on its network and location. Every request you make online includes your IP address, so we can see when two requests come from the same one and flag that referral as suspicious.

One IP address can cover more than one device. An average household might have two laptops and three phones, and if they're all on the same WiFi they'll usually share an IP address, as will an office full of colleagues on the same connection. This means genuine referrals made on the same network are likely to be blocked too.

When a customer follows the referral link, the setting is on, and we deem the referral suspicious, the customer sees a message explaining the referral was unsuccessful: "Oh dear! It looks like this referral has been unsuccessful. Please contact us to resolve the issue."

Both the heading and the message are translatable from the Languages tab.

Control reward spending and prevent abuse by capping how many referrals a customer can earn in a month. Once they hit the cap, choose one of two behaviors:

Guest referrals let shoppers who aren't loyalty members share a referral link and earn rewards, with no account required to refer. Once you enable it from your referral rule page, the referral pop-up becomes accessible to any visitor to your store.

Guests enter their name and email address to generate a referral link. The incentive code is tied to that email and can only be used by them. When a guest referral results in a successful purchase, the guest earns points or rewards as usual, but they'll need to sign up for a full account to access them.

Guest referrers are added to Shopify by default as soon as they generate their link, which means the customer.referral_complete event fires for their referrals. If you'd prefer guests weren't created in Shopify automatically, contact support to disable this.

When the setting is enabled, we will also push the referral_url property to customer accounts in integrated platforms, such as Attentive and Klaviyo, so they can be added to your email communication to further encourage referrals.

This is the email sent from your existing customer to their friend. You can customize this email by going to Program > Rules > Refer a friend > Customise referral email.

If you want to be a pro at LoyaltyLion emails, you can read our documentation on customizing emails here!

Sometimes, referees may forget to use their referral code when making their first purchase. In such cases, rewards can still be manually assigned using the following steps:

Follow the same steps as above to manually assign points to the referee, which they can use to claim a reward for future purchases.

Q. Can I set the minimum spend to $0?
No. Your customer needs to place an order for the referral to count as successful.

Q. [Custom site] Can I upload referral voucher codes via API, or does it have to be done manually?
At present, the only way to upload referral vouchers is manually.

Q. [Magento] My customers can't use the vouchers at the checkout and get an error message. What's wrong?

Your current coupon setup for referral coupons may not be letting customers claim the voucher. Go to your Magento admin > Marketing > Cart price rules > select [LoyaltyLion] Referrals flat, then scroll down to Uses per coupon and Uses per customer and check your settings match the example below. If the problem persists after you amend this, reach out to our Support team at support@loyaltylion.com so we can investigate further.
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If the problem still persists after you amend this, please reach out to our Support team at support@loyaltylion.com so we can investigate this for you further.

Q. Why are the referral vouchers usable up to 5 times (once per customer)?
We increased the number of uses to reduce a few things:

The codes don't cycle until they're used. For example, if you share your referral link in a group chat and three people click it at roughly the same time, they'll all get the same code. If the codes were single-use, two of those people would hit an error at the checkout. This isn't currently adjustable.

Q. What if the referee forgets to use the promo code?
Rewards for both the referrer and referee can be assigned manually, so neither party misses out because of a forgotten code.

Q. Can a referee use the discount if they've already applied another promotion?
No. Referees who have used other discounts on their first purchase (for example, a Memorial Day promo) are no longer considered new customers, so they can't use the referral discount on the same account or email.

Q. The referred friend spends $75 (the minimum spend) but then returns some items during the 30-day approval period. Does the referring friend still get their points?
When the referee makes a purchase, the referrer's referral activity is created in a pending state and linked to that event in the customer admin, from the referrals tab and the referring customer's page. The points are only approved when the purchase points are approved too. So if the referee returns the order and doesn't get their points, the referrer won't get points either.

Q. The referred friend visits through the referral URL but doesn't buy. Later they come back by typing the URL directly (not through the referral link) and apply their coupon code. Do they still trigger points for the referrer?
Yes. Even if the referred friend comes back through a different link or browser session, the referrer gets the points as long as "their" code was used and the other conditions (like minimum spend) are met.

Q. What happens if I have a collection restriction in place and a referred customer adds a product from outside the collection?
If the referred customer has no products from the restricted collection in their cart, they'll see the message "[VOUCHER CODE] isn't valid for the items in your cart". If they have a mix of products from inside and outside the collection, the voucher discount only applies to the products from the restricted collection.

If they have a mix of the products from a restricted collection and the ones outside it, the voucher discount will only be applied to the products from the restricted collection:
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Q. When a customer shares us on Facebook, the image is just our logo. Where is that pulling from, and can I change it?
Facebook builds the preview automatically from the URL shared (your store's URL and your store's logo), so this can't be customized within LoyaltyLion at this time.

Q. When a customer shares us on Facebook, the customizable message doesn't show. Why?
We don't have permissions to write to Facebook posts or Facebook Messenger, so the message won't carry across.