Referrals
All Lantern plans include referral reward features. Referrals are a great way to grow your customer base by incentivizing your customers to share your store with their friends. Lantern's referral features are a great way to build your member base and ensure that your referral program is attracting high value customers.
ℹ️ What's a Referral? Referrals are new customers that made a purchase after following a unique post, email, or link sent by one of your members. Read our Frequently Asked Questions about Referrals for more information.
Getting started
To get started with Referrals, go to your Lantern dashboard in your Shopify admin. Select Referrals from the list in the Lantern app navigation.
By default, your referral program is set to Disabled. We'll set this to active when we're ready to enable the program.
Setting up your rewards
🔔 Good to know: We use the term Advocate to talk about a member who sends a referral and the term Friend to talk about a new customer who receives the referral.
Lantern provides the ability to reward both Advocates and Friends when a referral happens. You can create discount code rewards or gift card rewards which are automatically generated in Shopify and attached to the user's account — limiting fraud and code sharing while increasing your member base.
Setting an Advocate reward
Advocate rewards incentivize your most loyal customers to promote your store, expanding your reach, and attracting high-quality customers at a lower cost. This strategy also fosters community and loyalty, encouraging repeat business.
Advocates receive their reward when a Friend makes a purchase that meets your referral criteria. We'll set that up later.
Click the Add link in the top right of the Advocate reward card.
Choose whether you want to offer a Discount code or a Gift Card type reward. Discount Code rewards apply to orders and can be either amount- or percent-based.
Set the amount for the reward type you selected.
Setting a Friend reward
Friend rewards are a great way to incentivize a first purchase from a new customer. Lantern requires new customers to sign up for an account to receive their referral reward — this helps limit fraudulent referrals and gives your customers another great reason to create an account.
Click the Add link in the top right of the Friend reward card.
Choose what type of reward you want to offer.
Order discount. The most common type of Friend reward. Order discounts apply on the first qualifying order made by the Friend. This is the best type of reward to create if you want to incentivize the first purchase. This is the most common type of Friend reward.
Gift card. Gift cards are awarded after the first qualifying order. This is the best type of reward to create if you want to incentivize a repeat purchase.
Set the amount for the reward type you selected.
Set whether Friends must spend a Minimum order value to receive their reward. This minimum order value will also be used to determine if the Advocate should receive a reward.
You can use this setting to make sure you're not giving away too much margin with each referral.
🔔 Good to know: Every successful referral results in both the Advocate and the Friend receiving a reward. Make sure you account for both when you're setting up your program.
Setting safeguards
Offering great referral rewards sometimes results in bad actors — some customers trying to game the system by referring themselves or creating other fraudulent referrals.
The first and best safeguard is built into Lantern's Referrals by default — we only allow signed in members to refer others. The more you create value around having a signed in member with attributed orders, the less likely someone will want to try to game the system. If you want to go further, Lantern provides a set of optional safeguards you can enable by clicking Edit.
Safeguard settings explained
Safeguard settings explained
Require advocate to have made an order before referring. This setting makes it so members can't send referrals unless they've previously made a purchase from your store. This is a great setting if you want to increase the quality of your referrals because it ensures that the member has purchasing experience.
Disable referrals from aliased emails. This setting ensures that customers can't use workarounds to refer themselves using common email aliasing techniques. We recommend keeping this setting enabled.
Disable referrals with the same IP address. This setting compares the referred Friend's IP address with the Advocate's IP address. If they're the same, the Friend isn't eligible to receive the referral. We only recommend enabling this if you are having trouble with fraudulent referrals as it can result in a lot of false positives.
Disable referrals with the same IP address and same user agent. This setting is similar to the above but only limits referrals if both the IP address and the browser information match. This reduces the false positives created by IP address checking but doesn't eliminate them.
Setting a Landing Page
The Landing Page setting gives you the ability to change the default that is provided when an Advocate shares their referral link. This is useful for sending referred Friends to a specific page, collection, or product.
By default, this is set to your homepage. To set a referral landing page, change the value of the input to the URL of the page you want.
Setting your Display Content
Cart discount message
The Cart discount message setting gives you the ability to customize the name of the discount shown in your cart and checkout.
Default share content
The Default share content setting gives you the ability to customize the default content that is used for Advocate email and social sharing. Advocates are able to customize this content before sharing their referrals.
Enabling your program
Now that your program is set up and working the way that you want, you can set the program to Active. This will turn on referrals so you can start testing your referral extensions on your Online Store theme. Don't forget to hit Save before moving on.
Once your program is enabled, you're ready to start setting up your Online Store by adding your Referral app blocks.