Referral links
A referral link tracks who brought you a customer: an influencer, an affiliate, a partner, or one customer sending a friend. You create a link for each of them, they share it, and this page tells you how many people arrived, how many bought, and how much revenue each one has generated.
The whole feature is built around one rule, and it's worth stating up front because it's the part that protects your partners: the first referral link a visitor arrives through is credited for good. No link clicked later (in the same session, or months afterwards) can take that credit away.
Create a link
Where: Referrals → New referral link.
Give it a label (the human name: Sofia (Instagram)) and, if you want, a code (the short text that appears in the URL: sofia-ig). Leave the code blank and it's generated from the label.
You get a link shaped like this:
https://yourstore.com/?srf_ref=sofia-igThat's your own site, with one parameter added. Nothing else changes: the tracking snippet you already installed is what reads it.
The link uses the Website URL saved on the site. If that field is missing or doesn't start withhttp://orhttps://, the page shows the code without a domain and tells you so.
What happens when someone clicks
- They land on your site. The snippet reads
srf_refand keeps it for that browsing session only, insessionStorage, not a cookie. Close the tab and it's gone. - If they buy, or otherwise become a known customer, that code is written onto their customer profile and locked there.
- From then on, every order that customer ever places counts towards that referral, not just the first one.
If they never come back, nothing is stored. No long-lived cookie following people around for 90 days: the link is only remembered while the visit lasts.
Why the credit can't be stolen
This is the design decision that matters, and it's deliberate.
A well-known trick in affiliate marketing is to overwrite the referral at the last moment: a browser extension, or a second link opened just before checkout, replaces whoever actually brought the customer. The person who did the work loses the commission, and usually never finds out.
Two things stop that here:
- Within a session: the first valid code wins. A second
srf_refopened later in the same session is ignored. - For the life of the customer: once a code is on a profile, it is never overwritten. Not by a different link, not in a future session, not ever.
The only way a customer changes referrer is if you change it yourself in the data.
Reading the numbers
| Column | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Arrivals | people who arrived through the link and were tracked as a profile |
| Customers | how many of those have placed at least one order |
| Revenue | total spent by those customers, for their whole lifetime, not just the first order |
Revenue is a lifetime figure on purpose. If a partner brings you someone who buys four times over a year, that partner brought you all four orders, and the number should say so.
If a referral's customers ordered in more than one currency, the revenue is marked with an asterisk: it's a plain sum, not converted at any exchange rate.
The same top five, ranked by revenue, also appear on the Acquisition page, labelled all time, because the rest of that page is last-30-days and the two aren't comparable.
Once a customer is credited, the code also shows next to them: a small via <code> badge in the Customers list, and a Referred by line on their individual profile page. Open a customer and you can see straight away whether they came through a partner, without checking this page first.
Pausing a link
Click the Active badge to pause a link. A paused link stops crediting new customers, but everything already attributed to it stays exactly as it is: the history, the revenue, the customers. Nobody loses what they've already earned.
Use pause when a collaboration ends. There's no delete on purpose: deleting a link would silently rewrite the past.
What it doesn't do
It does not calculate or pay commissions. It tells you, accurately, who brought whom and what it was worth. The payout itself stays wherever you handle payouts today.