Rewards
Your rewards are the single biggest lever on whether a referral program spreads. Every Bloop referral has two of them, and they do different jobs. The referee reward lowers the barrier for a new customer to try you — it has to feel worth acting on. The referrer reward thanks an existing customer for the introduction — it has to feel worth the social risk of recommending you.
Balance generosity against margin. A reward your customers shrug at will not move anyone; a reward bigger than the profit on a referred order quietly loses you money on every success. The settings below let you tune the type, the value, the conditions, and the timing so the offer is appealing on the outside and profitable on the inside. You configure each side from the Referrer reward and Referee reward sections of the Campaign tab, and each can be switched on or off with the Reward status toggle.
Best practice: Match the reward type to your repeat-purchase pattern. Store credit pulls customers back for another order, so it suits stores people buy from often; cash or a percentage discount carries more weight when purchases are rare or one-off. Set the combined value below your referral profit margin and you cannot lose. See the best referral incentives for worked examples.
Why both sides need a reward
A two-sided "give-and-get" reward — where the friend also gets something — consistently outperforms a referrer-only offer. Give-and-get structures have been shown to lift customer lifetime value by 31% compared with give-only offers. People feel awkward asking a friend to buy something purely so they get paid, but they happily share an offer that helps the friend too. The referee reward removes the social risk; the referrer reward says thank you. Bloop is built around this two-sided model — both rewards are first-class settings that you tune independently.
Referred customers are worth defending the margin for. Research on roughly 10,000 accounts found referred customers churn 18% less and carry 16% higher lifetime value than customers acquired any other way (Schmitt, Skiera & Van den Bulte, Journal of Marketing, 2011). A reward you "overpay" on a first order can still be the cheapest, stickiest customer you acquire all quarter — judge the cost against lifetime value, not the first order alone.
Choose a referrer reward type
The referrer reward supports four types. Pick the one that fits how you want to pay out.
Discount coupon
A Shopify discount code — fixed amount or percentage; can be restricted to specific products or collections
Automatic in Shopify
Store credits
Shopify Store Credit applied directly to the customer's account
Automatic in Shopify
Cash
Tracked in Bloop; you process the payment yourself
Manual payout
Custom
A reward you describe in your own words (a gift, swag, a service) and fulfil yourself
Manual — held for your approval
Cash rewards require a payment method on your account before they can be enabled. Add or update one in the payment method settings.
Custom rewards
A custom reward is anything that doesn't fit a discount, credit, or cash payout — a free gift, branded merchandise, a service, early access. Instead of a value, you write a short description of what the referrer receives (up to 500 characters; the default reads "a free gift"). That text is what the referrer sees on the hub, in emails, and in their customer account, exactly as you wrote it.
A custom reward is never issued automatically. When a referral qualifies, the reward is held as Pending for you to approve — no code, credit, or cash is generated. You approve it from the Referral orders view once you've arranged to fulfil it, and that approval is recorded as the moment it was fulfilled. Because there's a person in the loop, a custom reward has no discount value, minimum, or expiry to set — just the description.
Use a custom reward when the incentive lives outside Shopify. For everything you can pay out inside Shopify, a discount code, store credit, or cash is simpler because it issues on its own.
When to choose each type
Store credit
You want the referrer's next order, and people buy from you more than once
Credit only has value if they come back, so it loops them in for a repeat purchase instead of leaving the store. Best for high-frequency categories — beauty, food, fashion, subscriptions.
Discount coupon
You want the broadest, most familiar incentive and your products are bought occasionally
A percentage or fixed discount reads as real money off and works whether or not the customer returns soon. The safe default for most stores.
Cash
Purchases are rare, high-ticket, or one-off — and store credit would feel worthless
Someone who buys a mattress or a laptop once is not motivated by store credit they may never use; cash is the only reward that carries weight when repeat purchase is unlikely.
Store credit costs you margin but keeps the money in your ecosystem; cash costs you actual cash but works when nothing else will. If you can plausibly expect a second order, store credit is almost always the more profitable choice because a meaningful share of it converts into another sale rather than a payout.
Recommended rewards by industry
The best choice follows how your customers buy. Use the table below as a starting point, then refine with your own margins.
Fashion & apparel
Frequent, impulse-driven
Store credit toward the next order
Percentage off the first order
Subscription
Recurring, retention-led
Store credit or a free billing cycle
Discount on the first cycle
Beauty & cosmetics
Repeat, habit-forming
Store credit to encourage restocking
Fixed amount off a trial-sized first order
Electronics & high-ticket
Infrequent, considered
Cash or a meaningful fixed amount
Fixed amount off the first purchase
Food & beverage
Low margin, high frequency
Modest store credit
Small percentage or free add-on
High-frequency stores benefit from store credit because it loops customers back, while infrequent high-ticket stores often need cash or a sizeable fixed amount to feel worth a recommendation. For a deeper walkthrough of matching the reward to your economics, see best practices: choosing the right referral reward.
Set the discount value
For discount coupon and store credit rewards, choose how much the reward is worth:
Fixed amount — a set value off, in your store currency.
Percentage — a percentage off the order.
The referee reward uses the same value settings for the discount given to referred friends.
Fixed amount vs percentage, and how much to give
A fixed amount ($10 off) is concrete and predictable, but it reads as generous on a $40 order and trivial on a $400 one. A percentage (10% off) scales with the basket, which protects your margin on big orders but can feel small on cheap ones. Stores with a tight price band tend to prefer fixed amounts; stores with a wide price range usually prefer percentages so the giveaway stays proportional.
On how much, more generous is not automatically better — a smaller incentive sometimes wins on total economics because you acquire customers more cheaply for the same number of referrals. The reliable discipline is the margin rule below; the reliable way to refine it is to A/B test your referral rewards once the program has traffic.
The margin rule. Add the referrer reward and the referee reward together, and keep that combined cost below the profit you make on a referred order. Do that and every successful referral is still profitable, no matter how many you get. Get it wrong and volume works against you — each extra referral loses a little more money.
Add minimum requirements
Minimum requirements decide what a referral must achieve before the referrer reward is issued. Choose one:
None — the reward is issued on any qualifying referral purchase.
Minimum purchase amount — the referee's order must reach a set total.
Minimum quantity of items — the referee's order must contain enough items.
Minimum quantity of referees — the referrer must reach a set number of successful referees before a reward is issued.
The minimum-referees option rewards in cycles. With a threshold of 5, the reward is issued at referee #5, #10, #15, and so on. Between thresholds, the referrer gets a "not enough referrals yet" notification instead of a reward.
When to use a minimum — and when not to
A minimum requirement is a guardrail, not a growth lever. It rarely lifts conversion; it stops the program paying out on orders too small to be worth it. Use one when:
Your margin is thin on small baskets. A minimum purchase amount stops you giving away a $10 reward on a $12 order. Set it near your average order value, not above it — pitch it too high and you suppress the referrals you wanted.
You sell a low-priced "tripwire" product people could buy purely to trigger the reward. A minimum quantity of items or a minimum spend closes that loophole.
You want to concentrate rewards on your best advocates. The minimum-referees option pays only the people who bring in real volume, which suits VIP or ambassador-style programs.
Leave it at None when you are launching or when volume is your priority — every extra hurdle between a friend and the discount costs you some shares. Add a minimum once you see which orders are unprofitable, not as a default.
Scale rewards as referrers grow
The settings above configure a single flat reward — every referrer earns the same amount regardless of how many friends they bring in. If you want to pay more to referrers who convert more, Bloop's FlexiTiers feature lets you define multiple reward levels based on referral count: a smaller reward for the first referral, a bigger one from the fifth, an even bigger one from the tenth, and so on.
See Set up tiered referral rewards for how to configure tiers, choose what happens after the final tier, and control how past referrals are counted.
Set an expiry date
Reward codes can be set to expire:
None — codes never expire.
Valid period — codes become unavailable after a set number of days, counted from the date the code is created.
Bloop sends a reminder email a few days before a code expires, so referrers and referees have time to redeem.
A short valid period (say 14–30 days) creates gentle urgency and helps codes convert sooner rather than sitting unused; the reminder email is what makes it work without feeling punitive. Leave expiry at None if your sales cycle is long — for considered, high-ticket purchases, a hard deadline can kill a referral that simply needed time to mature.
Control the review period
Inside the referrer reward, the Reward review period sets a delay in hours before a reward is approved. Enter 0 for instant approval. Orders flagged as suspicious follow a separate mandatory hold regardless of this setting.
Instant approval (0) gives the best referrer experience — the thank-you lands while the goodwill is fresh, and that is what prompts the next share. A short delay of a few hours to a day buys a window to catch obvious problems before a reward goes out, which is worth it for high-value cash rewards or stores that have seen abuse. Because Bloop already holds suspicious orders on a separate mandatory review, you do not need a long blanket delay to protect against fraud — see referral fraud prevention for how that layer works.
Issue a reward on payment or on fulfillment
The Order settings section (Referral → Settings) controls which point in an order's life counts as a successful referral. The success trigger has two options:
Paid (default) — the reward is issued as soon as Shopify marks the referred order as paid.
Fulfilled — the reward is issued only once you mark the order as fulfilled or shipped.
Choose Paid for the fastest thank-you and the strongest nudge to share again — right for most stores. Choose Fulfilled if you want to be sure the order actually ships before you reward it: useful for made-to-order goods, pre-orders, or any catalogue where a paid order can still be cancelled before it leaves. The reward review period and fraud hold above still apply on top of whichever trigger you pick.
Revoke a reward when an order is cancelled or refunded
A referral can turn out not to be a real sale — the referred customer cancels, or returns the order for a full refund. The revoke trigger in Order settings decides when Bloop claws an already-issued reward back:
Both (default)
The order is cancelled or fully refunded
Order cancelled
Only when the order is cancelled
Order refunded
Only when the order is fully refunded
Revocation always happens on at least one of these conditions — it cannot be switched off entirely. A partial refund never revokes a reward; only a full refund counts.
What "clawing back" means depends on the reward type, and Bloop never claws back a reward the referrer has already used:
Discount coupon — the Shopify discount code is deleted and made invalid, unless it was already used.
Store credit — the granted amount is debited back from the customer's store-credit balance (never more than they currently hold).
Cash — revoked, unless you had already paid it out.
Custom — revoked, unless you had already fulfilled it.
Every revocation is recorded in the referral activity log with a short explanation, and the referrer sees the reward marked Revoked on their referral hub, so nobody is left guessing. A longer reward review period is still your first line of defence — it lets you catch a bad order before the reward is ever created — while the revoke trigger handles the cancellations and refunds that arrive after approval.
A worked example
Here is the full reward setup for a beauty store, end to end. All numbers below are illustrative — they show how to reason, not measured Bloop results.
Know your numbers. Average order value is $50, and your gross margin is about 60%, so a referred order earns roughly $30 of profit. That $30 is your reward budget — the combined referrer + referee cost has to stay under it to keep every referral profitable.
Set the referee reward. Beauty buyers come back, so you want the friend to try you. You give referees 15% off their first order — about $7.50 on a typical basket. Appealing, and well inside budget.
Set the referrer reward. People restock skincare, so you choose store credit to loop the referrer back. You give $10 in store credit. Combined cost is roughly $17.50 against $30 of profit — still profitable, with room to spare.
Add a guardrail. You set a minimum purchase amount of $35 so the reward never fires on a tiny trial-size order, and you leave the review period at 0 for an instant thank-you. Codes get a 30-day valid period to nudge redemption.
Plan to test. Your starting bet is "15% referee / $10 referrer." Once shares are flowing, you A/B test whether a lower referrer reward (say $7.50 credit) keeps the same volume more cheaply — the kind of give-less-win experiment that sometimes wins on economics.
Common mistakes to avoid
Rewarding only the referrer. A give-only offer asks customers to pressure friends with nothing in it for the friend. Two-sided give-and-get spreads further and lifts lifetime value. Always give the referee something.
Ignoring the margin math. Setting rewards by gut, without adding both sides and comparing to your profit on a referred order, is how programs quietly lose money on every success. Do the margin math first.
Using store credit where it has no value. For one-off, high-ticket purchases, store credit the customer will never spend is a non-reward. Use cash or a meaningful fixed amount where repeat purchase is unlikely.
Stacking too many hurdles at launch. Minimums, long review delays, and short expiry windows each shave off some shares. Start generous and frictionless; add guardrails only once you can see which orders are unprofitable.
Setting it once and never testing. The "right" reward is store-specific and changes as you grow. Treat your launch values as a hypothesis and refine them — see A/B test your referral rewards.
Next steps
Decide how referrers share their reward in Referral methods.
Set who is allowed to refer in Target audience.
Prove which reward wins with A/B test your referral rewards.
Match the reward to your economics with best practices: choosing the right referral reward.
See the full setup flow in Getting started with referrals.
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