How to Create Referral Programs in commercetools?

If you’re reading this, you probably already have your ecommerce built on commercetools, or you’re about to create one. Though commercetools is an excellent composable commerce solution that offers plenty of features, it does not have built-in referral programs. To provide your customers with a fully-functional referral program in commercetools, all you need to do is integrate your commercetools store with Voucherify.

‍So here are three questions I’m going to answer in this article:

• Is integrating Voucherify with commercetools worth it?
• How to create a referral program using Voucherify?
• How to make referral programs work with commercetools?

Why integrate Voucherify into your commercetools store?

While commercetools is a leading composable commerce software, its promotion feature may not cover all your requirements, especially when thinking about scale. Luckily, commercetools empowers users to enhance its capabilities with external, specialized solutions via API Extensions.

But why should you connect Voucherify with your commercetools-powered store:

• ‍More scenarios: In addition to the lack of referral capabilities, commercetools does not natively support bundling, loyalty programs, offer stacking, or gift cards – features which are often essential for engaging both loyal advocates and attracting new users effectively.

• Personalization: Voucherify provides more advanced customer segmentation, targeting options, and real-time personalization for not just referrals, but other campaign types too.‍

• Enhanced referral experience: commercetools lacks a native solution to built a visual dashboard for advocates to track their referral score. ‍

• Campaign handling: commercetools has limitations in managing a high volume of concurrent campaigns. What's more, commercetools runs all campaigns within one editor, posing challenges for companies with multi-region or multi-brand setups and numerous local campaigns.

• Campaign management: commercetools' search feature may be cumbersome, lacking specific filters for region, currency, store, or channel-specific campaigns. Also, commercetools enforces fixed access permissions for the entire project, lacking the flexibility to set permissions separately for different channels, stores, or countries.

• ‍Reduced IT reliance: The commercetools promotion engine demands more involvement from engineering teams, lacking features such as out-of-the-box bulk referral codes generation available in Voucherify.

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How to create a referral program using Voucherify?

There are plenty of reasons why including the Voucherify plugin into your marketing stack is a good idea. In Voucherify, referral programs are not just one of many features – they belong to the most crucial parts of our Promotion Engine.

Creating referral programs in Voucherify is a straightforward process, and the possibilities are endless. Let’s see what exactly you can achieve with Voucherify:

• Single- and double-sided referral programs – reward only the referrers, or both referrers and referees (advocates and friends).
• Reward tiers – motivate referrers to bring more customers to your company – give them additional rewards for surpassing the predetermined thresholds.
• Personalized referrals – add customer attributes to the program, and send referral codes or links to specific customer segments.
• Custom referral events – usually the referral conversion counts when the referee places an order, but if you’ve got a different idea, just go with it – you can set your own referral events.
• Custom attributes – add metadata to customize your referral programs even further.
• Omnichannel messaging – send referral codes and other notifications via numerous channels, such as SMS, email or third party apps.
• Referral fraud protection – set various limitations, webhooks or include verification methods to make sure your customers (and your referral program) are safe.
• Referral tracking – see how well your program performs – check how many times referral codes were redeemed, what’s their validity status and more.

The list above does not contain everything, but it should give you a glimpse of what you can expect from Voucherify referral programs.

How to make referral programs work with commercetools?

Assuming you already have your webstore built in commercetools, start setting up the integration – you can find it here (the installation guide and all the files are stored on GitHub).

Important note: Voucherify integration with commercetools is open source – it means that it’s merely a foundation on which the development team can build more functionalities or adjust the already implemented ones to fit your company’s needs.

With your webstore connected to Voucherify, your customers will be able to use referral codes assigned to them in Voucherify and redeem them while shopping in your store. After the code is successfully used, the referral is saved in Voucherify and the reward is automatically assigned to the advocate.  

Here’s an example: after setting up the referral program in Voucherify and installing the integration with commercetools, I assigned the code (REF10-Cds9ya) to a customer:

After that, the referral code can be used in the store. I’ve logged in to another customer’s account and made a purchase using previously published code:

If you did everything correctly, the outcome should be as follows:

• Chris’s friend gets a discount for using a referral code (if you have a double-sided program).
• The referral is saved in Voucherify and noted in Chris’ profile.
• A referral reward is automatically assigned to Chris.

What other promotions can you run with Voucherify and commercetools?

Though commercetools comes with a promotion module, its features are limited – as I mentioned before, it lacks the referral program functionality. But the Voucherify plugin can be used for far more than just referral programs. What other sales promotions can you run with Voucherify?

• Loyalty programs.
• Dynamic discounts that change values based on custom formula.  
• Proportionally split discounts.
• Flexible product- and order-specific discounts.
• Advanced, customizable free item promotions and BOGO promotions.

How to migrate commercetools promotions to Voucherify?

If you rely on promotions in commercetools and/or your checkout component is tightly coupled with promotions, it's advisable to gradually shift to Voucherify to minimize disruptions and risks, speeding up the time it takes to see value.

Learn more on how to perform the migration from commercetools promotions to Voucherify with minimal disruptions >

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