Create a Refer-a-Friend Program With Flexible Tracking, Rewards, and Partner Management

What This Recipe Does

This recipe creates a referral program designed for your existing customers. Each customer gets a unique referral link. When they share it with a friend and that friend makes a purchase, the referrer earns a flat $10 reward in store credit.

Unlike a traditional affiliate program, this is framed as a customer loyalty feature. The language, structure, and reward model are designed around everyday customers sharing with people they know, not professional marketers running campaigns. Customers think in dollar amounts, not percentages, so the reward is a simple flat rate.

Who It’s For

• Store owners who want organic growth through customer word-of-mouth, with a structured incentive to encourage sharing
• Brands building community that want to reward loyal customers for bringing in new buyers
• Subscription and membership businesses looking for a low-cost, automated way to acquire new customers through existing ones

How It Works

When you apply this recipe, Siren creates a referral program that your customers can join. You set up a registration form (Siren provides tools for this) where customers sign up and receive a unique referral link.

When a customer shares their link and a friend clicks it, Siren records a referred site visit and binds that friend to the referrer. If the friend goes on to make a purchase, the referrer earns a $10 reward.

The reward is a fixed amount of store credit, stored internally as 1000 units and valued one to one with your store currency, so 1000 means $10.00 of credit. It does not change based on what the friend buys. Whether the friend spends $15 or $150, the referrer earns $10 of store credit.

If a friend clicks referral links from two different customers before purchasing, the most recent referral gets credit. This keeps the program straightforward for customers who do not need to think about attribution rules.

The referral reward is paid in store credit, a custom currency the referrer redeems on a future order. You review and approve each earned balance, then issue it by hand on the free tier or let a credit autofulfiller post it automatically as a checkout coupon (a Siren Essentials feature). Either way the credit stays inside your store and pulls the referrer back for another purchase.

Transaction compilers include line items only, so the reward triggers on actual product purchases. Shipping, taxes, and fees are excluded from the trigger conditions.

Automating store credit at checkout

The referrer is rewarded in a custom store-credit currency rather than cash, so the reward stays inside your store and brings them back for another order. Defining that currency and rewarding referrers in it are free-tier features, and on the free tier you issue each balance by hand.

To make the reward automatic, the way the program is framed, add a credit autofulfiller. It turns each earned balance into a coupon that applies at the referrer’s next checkout, with no manual step. The binding is a Siren Essentials feature, so the program runs free and the automation is the upgrade. Add it by binding the store-credit currency to the built-in credit fulfillment method:

{
  "autofulfillers": {
    "storeCreditAuto": { "currency": "STORE_CREDIT", "method": "credit" }
  }
}