Referrals turn your happy customers into a source of new ones. An existing customer (the advocate) shares a personal referral link. Their friend gets a discount on their first order, and the advocate gets a reward once that order goes through.
Mage Loyalty gives you two ways to run referrals: Basic Referrals inside your loyalty widget, and branded Referral Campaigns that you place on your storefront. This article explains how they work and where to find everything.
What are Referrals?
Both options give the friend a reward and the advocate a reward. They differ in how much you can customise and control.
Option | What it is |
Basic Referrals | A simple referral setup shown inside the Mage Loyalty widget. You choose a Referred Friend Reward and a Referring Customer Reward and switch it on. Available on every plan. See Basic Referrals - Overview & Setup. |
Referral Campaigns | A fully branded referral block for your storefront with its own rewards, wording, design, site-wide popup, fraud protection, reward timing and a referrals report where you can approve or reject referrals. Requires the Growth plan or above. |
Basic Referrals and Referral Campaigns are independent. You can run one or both at the same time.
How a Referral Campaign Works
The advocate joins. On the campaign block, a logged in customer clicks the invite button to get their unique referral link. If you allow guest referrals, visitors can join with just their email address.
The advocate shares. They copy their link or use the share buttons you switch on in Referrals > Settings (WhatsApp, Facebook, X, Email and SMS).
The friend clicks the link. They land on your store and see the claim form, either on the campaign block or in the site-wide popup.
The friend claims their reward. They enter their email address and get a single-use discount code. If auto-apply is on, the discount is added to their cart for them.
The friend places their first order.
The advocate is rewarded. By default the advocate gets their reward 14 days after the friend pays, as long as the order has not been cancelled or refunded. You can change this under Advocate Reward Timing in Referrals Settings.
Referral rewards are for new customers. A friend who has already placed an order with your store cannot claim a referral discount.
How the Advocate Receives Their Reward
The advocate's reward is a single-use discount code. Once it has been issued, the referral shows Completed in View Referrals. How the code reaches the advocate depends on how they joined:
Logged in advocates: the code is tied to their customer account and appears with their other rewards, for example in your loyalty widget.
Guest advocates: they have no account to view the code in, so it only reaches them in a message. A Free Product reward needs a customer account, so it cannot be issued to a guest advocate.
To send the code as a message, switch on the Referrer Reward Email under Email Templates, or switch on the Referral Reward Earned event in your Klaviyo, Omnisend, Postscript or Attentive integration and send the code from that tool.
Every referral email starts switched off. A referral shows Completed as soon as the reward is issued, whether or not a message went out, so set one of these up before you launch, above all if you allow guest referrals.
Finding Your Way Around
Open Mage Loyalty from your Shopify admin and click Referrals in the left menu. The page has three sections:
Section | What it does |
Referral Campaigns | Create, edit and review your referral campaigns. Only shown on the Growth plan or above. See Creating a Referral Campaign. |
Basic Referrals | Turn Basic Referrals on or off and set the friend and advocate rewards. |
Settings | Shared settings: the page referral links open on, sharing channels, guest referrals, when advocates get their reward, fraud prevention and email templates. See Referrals Settings. |
Reviewing Referrals
For each campaign, click Manage and then View Referrals to see how it is performing and every referral it has produced.
The Referral funnel shows Link clicks, Claims, Conversions and Rewarded.
Tabs let you filter referrals: All, Pending, Completed, Rejected and Blocked. The Blocked tab lists claims stopped by fraud prevention.
Each referral has a Manage menu with View details, Approve referral (send the advocate their reward now) and Reject referral (end the referral so the advocate is not rewarded).
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Leaving the app embed switched off. Without it, referral links are not tracked and the site-wide popup cannot appear. Enable the Mage Loyalty app embed before launching a campaign.
Expecting the advocate reward straight after the friend orders. By default the reward is sent 14 days after payment so cancelled or refunded orders are not rewarded. Change the timing under Advocate Reward Timing if you want it sooner.
Sending referral links to a page with nothing on it. Set the Referrals Landing URL Path to a page that has your campaign block, or keep the site-wide popup switched on so friends always see the claim form.
Troubleshooting
I can't see Referral Campaigns
Referral Campaigns require the Growth plan or above.
An advocate says they have not received their reward
Open the campaign's View Referrals page and check the referral's stage. It may still be waiting for the friend's order or for the reward date. For what each stage means, see Creating a Referral Campaign.
If the stage is Completed, the reward has been issued. A logged in advocate can find the code with their other rewards. A guest advocate only gets it in a message, so check that the Referrer Reward Email is switched on under Email Templates, or that your email tool is sending it.
Check Advocate Reward Timing in Referrals > Settings.
If the friend's order was cancelled or refunded, no reward is sent, and a reward that was already sent is withdrawn if the advocate has not used it yet. The referral then shows Order cancelled and the advocate is not notified.
A partial refund only has this effect when it takes the order below the friend reward's minimum spend.
To reward them now, use Approve referral from the referral's Manage menu. A referral cannot be approved once the friend's order has been cancelled or fully refunded.
A friend says they cannot claim their discount
Friends who have ordered from your store before cannot claim.
Look in the Blocked tab of View Referrals to see if a fraud prevention setting stopped the claim, and why.