5 Best WooCommerce Referral Plugins in 2024 (Compared)

Priyanka Okidi | Posted on July 8, 2024 |

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On the hunt for the best WooCommerce referral plugin to create a customer referral program for your online business?

WooCommerce offers a wide array of native features. But the ability to build a referral marketing program isn’t one.

That’s where referral program plugins come in.

In this post, we’ve rounded up the top plugins to help you create, manage, and scale your WooCommerce store’s referral program, beginning with our plugin, Coupon Affiliates.

Note: Launched in 2019, Coupon Affiliates is our own WooCommerce referral plugin. We continually pour a lot of work into it and are super proud of what we’ve built. What’s more, thousands of sites across various niches — e-learning, eCommerce stores, membership sites, and others — use Coupon Affiliates to manage successful referral programs. Many say it’s the best WooCommerce referral plugin. Get started with the free version or pro version (with a 7-day free trial) now.

The Best WooCommerce Referral Plugin

Here’s an overview of the best referral plugins for WooCommerce. Read on for a more in-depth review of their key features, ease of use, and pricing.

Coupon Affiliates

Plugin developer: Coupon Affiliates

Coupon Affiliates is the best WooCommerce referral plugin to create and manage any kind of referral marketing program, whether you plan to have a handful of members or thousands.

It enables you to add a two-sided referral program that rewards both members of your program and referred customers. For example, if you sell online courses, for every fresh referral, the new customer gets a $50 coupon, and the referring customer gets $50 in store credit or cash incentives.

Coupon Affiliates provides all the tools you need to set your referral program up for success, including tailored registration forms, individual member dashboards, unique referral links, referral codes, and QR codes, multiple incentive options, advanced tracking, comprehensive admin reports, emails, social shares, fraud detection tools, and more.

And because it’s purpose-built for WooCommerce, it provides a smooth setup and user experience for site admins and referral program participants. Another helpful bonus: All users (including those using the free version of the plugin) get timely, friendly UK-based support if required.

A quick note: As mentioned, Coupon Affiliates is a versatile plugin that enables you to manage other types of referrals, such as from affiliates or creators/influencers. In this post, we’ll focus on its use as a WooCommerce referral program plugin.

Let’s look at the top features that make Coupon Affiliates the best WooCommerce referral plugin.

Coupon Affiliates’ top features

Enable Referrals Via Links, Coupon Codes, And QR Codes

Once participants are accepted into your referral program, Coupon Affiliates automatically creates unique links, coupon codes, and QR codes that they can share with their friends and family. (Alternatively, site admins and referral program members can create referral links and coupons manually).

Participants earn incentives on completed orders made via their coupon code, referral link, or QR code. For example, a customer might share their unique code with their family and friends, and they’d receive a %20 commission for orders made with their code.

Easy-to-use Customer Referral Dashboard

Showing program participants their stats is a great way to motivate them to refer more people.

Participants get individual login details once they are approved to join your program. They can access their account to view detailed stats like referral coupon code usage, total sales, commission earned, payout summary, etc.

Here’s a quick look at the customer referral dashboard (Note that each participant can only access their stats).

Flexible Rewards

You can customize referral rewards to fit your specific business needs. There are multiple ways to tailor your reward structure, including providing a fixed rate per product or order, a percentage of the order total, custom rates for each participant or user role, recurring rewards, and lifetime rewards.

Participants can access their rewards via their dashboards and receive them in two ways: cash payouts via their preferred payment method or store credit that they can redeem on future orders.

Comprehensive Admin Dashboard And Reports

Coupon Affiliates tracks everything and presents all the data in a comprehensive dashboard. This gives site admins a complete picture of the referral program’s performance at a glance.

As shown in the image above, the site admin dashboard shows crucial referral marketing metrics like member signups, successful sales, pending commissions, payouts, etc.

In addition, you can create and export reports showing custom metrics (for example, to share with others or for record-keeping) based on date range, referral code usage, conversion rates, and more.

Powerful Email Notification System

Coupon Affiliates enables you to set up a robust automated email system to engage with participants of your referral program. For example, you can set up an email to notify participants when their application is approved, their coupon code is used, a referred order is canceled, refunded, or failed, and more.

It also sends relevant email notifications to site admins where necessary. For example, to notify you when someone applies to join your program, submits a payout request, and more.

Promotion Channels

Social share tabs eliminate friction for referral program participants.

You can enable social share buttons to be added to participants’ dashboards to make it even easier for them to share their unique referral links on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), WhatsApp, Reddit, Tumblr, and email.

Wide Variety Of Payment Methods

Coupon Affiliates lets you shell out rewards in three ways:

Referral program admins can schedule automated daily, weekly, or monthly reward payouts.
Referral program admins can manually initiate payouts to individual program members.
Referral program participants can raise payment requests through their dashboards.

Once a payout is requested either manually or automatically, there are various channels and options to fulfill it: PayPal, Stripe, manual bank transfers, and store credit.

Coupon Affiliates price: Free version available. Premium plans start at $19.99 per month with a 7-day free trial, and a 14-day no questions asked money-back guarantee.

Referral System For WooCommerce

Plugin Developer: Codup

Referral System for WooCommerce is a powerful premium referral program plugin available directly on WooCommerce.com. It enables you to reward both participants and referred customers for signups and successful orders.

Here’s how it works: Program participants share their referral links with people. Referred customers need to click the referral link and create an account to receive a unique coupon code. Then they can enter the coupon code at the checkout page to receive their referral discount. Participants will also be rewarded for their efforts.

Rewards can be offered in the form of a fixed-amount discount, percentage-based discount, or loyalty points (when paired with the WooCommerce Points and Rewards plugin).

Referral System for WooCommerce price: Premium version only. Paid plans start at $49 per year, with a 30-day money-back guarantee via WooCommerce’s official marketplace.

WPLoyalty

Plugin developer: WPLoyalty

If you’re looking to add a points and rewards program to your WooCommerce site, WPLoyalty might be worth checking out.

It is a freemium plugin that lets you create campaigns to reward customers for various actions and milestones, such as registering for an account, placing an order, social media mentions, reviews, birthdays, and of course, referrals.

WPLoyalty earns its spot on this list of the best WooCommerce referral plugin by offering many features that enable you to tailor your referral program to suit your business. For instance, you can award points on a tiered basis, define a timeframe for the points to expire, set up email sequences to keep customers posted about points accumulated and point expiration dates, and more.

In addition, it offers a lot of supplementary features to help you promote your referral program on your website and encourage participants to earn more points. For example, you can customize the layout, design, copy, and other elements of the rewards page to suit your brand. It lets you add a widget and panel to several pages on the front end to promote your referral program. You can also showcase points to be earned on product catalog pages, product detail pages, as well as cart and checkout pages.

Points and Rewards for WooCommerce price: Free version available. Premium plans start at $99 per year with a 14-day no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.

Refer A friend For WooCommerce

Plugin developer: WPGens

Best WooCommerce referral plugin - WooCommerce Refer a Friend

Another great option, Refer a friend for WooCommerce is a freemium plugin that enables you to add a simple yet powerful referral program to your site.

The free version of the plugin lets you create a one-sided referral program that rewards participants only. You can upgrade to the premium version to be able to reward both participants and referred customers.

Upgrading to the premium version also unlocks additional features that are not available with the free version, such as detailed statistics to help you monitor your program’s performance, advanced shortcodes that let you add the referral link anywhere on your site, social share icons to make it easier to share referral links, and much more.

Refer a friend for WooCommerce price: Free version available. Premium plans start at $59 per year with a 14-day no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.

ReferralCandy

Plugin developer: ReferralCandy

Another solid contender for the best WooCommerce referral plugin, ReferralCandy is an all-in-one referral marketing tool that integrates with a variety of platforms, including Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, and of course, WooCommerce. It’s a trusted solution used by large eCommerce stores like Steve Madden, Tupperware, Stanley, and others.

This tool lets you create a double-sided rewards program that gives existing customers referral coupon codes to share with other people. Referred customers must enter the coupon code during checkout to receive a discount. Referrers receive rewards such as store discounts, cash payouts, or custom gifts like branded swag items.

ReferralCandy makes promoting your program and recruiting participants across several channels easy. For example, you can connect it with your email service provider, such as MailChimp or Klaviyo, to invite email subscribers and show pop-ups to visitors browsing your store and customers at the end of the checkout process to enable them to join your referral program.

ReferralCandy price: Premium version only with a 14-day free trial. Plans start at $59 + 3.5% commission on each order.

Which Is The Best WooCommerce Referral Plugin For You?

There you have it — the best WooCommerce referral plugin options to recruit participants, manage incentives, and implement a referral program in your online store.

All the plugins on this list offer solid free versions, free trials, or no-questions-asked money-back guarantees that allow you to test drive their features. Feel free to check them out and choose the best referral plugin for your WooCommerce store.

Coupon Affiliates is our product and therefore the only plugin we know through and through. We believe it’s the best WooCommerce referral plugin. As such, it’s the only tool we can endorse with absolute confidence. (We’re not alone — thousands of users love and endorse it too. It’s been rated 5 stars in the WordPress plugin directory with plenty of positive reviews.)

To recap, with Coupon Affiliates, you’ll get everything you need to manage your WooCommerce site’s referral marketing program, including tailored signup forms, customer and site admin dashboards, unique referral links, coupon codes, and QR codes, flexible rewards, powerful email notification system, social share buttons, fraud prevention tools, and much more.

Moreover, all users (including those on the free version of the plugin) get timely, friendly UK-based support if needed.

Check out Coupon Affiliates’ free version or get the pro version (with a 7-day free trial).

Priyanka Okidi

Priyanka is a writer for WordPress and eCommerce companies. She loves breaking down complex ideas into simple concepts.