Understanding the referral flow

Article 1 in this collection, What is Soreto?, introduces the referrer and friend roles and walks through the basic loop at a high level. This article goes one level deeper into that same loop — it's the one to come back to when you (or someone on your team) needs to picture exactly what a customer sees and does at each step, rather than just knowing that a loop exists.

Nothing here changes based on which campaign you've built — the sequence below is the same for every referral, regardless of your reward structure, your copy, or which placements you've enabled. What differs from campaign to campaign is covered elsewhere: which placements show the invitation (Widgets & Placements), and what each side actually receives (Setting Up Rewards).

The flow, step by step

1. Your customer completes a purchase.

Every referral starts with an existing customer buying something from your store. This is the moment Soreto treats someone as a referrer — there's no separate sign-up or opt-in step before this; the purchase itself is what makes the invitation to share relevant.

2. They see an invitation to share.

What happens next depends on which placements your campaign has enabled. Most merchants lean on the placements that sit right after checkout — the thank-you page or the order status page — since that's the moment a customer's purchase is freshest in their mind. If you've also enabled the floating widget or the inline card, a customer could just as easily encounter the invitation to share elsewhere on your store, on a visit unrelated to a specific order. Either way, the invitation itself looks and reads the same: it's driven by your campaign's copy and images, not by which placement happens to be showing it.

3. They share their referral link.

To get their personal referral link, the customer enters their first name and email address. Soreto uses this to personalize their share (for example, addressing the friend by the referrer's name) and to track the referral back to them once a friend acts on it. No account or password is involved — just those two fields.

Once that's done, Soreto generates a unique referral link for that customer and presents a set of sharing options. Customers can send their link via WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, X (formerly Twitter), Pinterest, or email, or simply copy the link and paste it wherever they like — a text message, a group chat, anywhere. Which of these channels appear can vary by campaign configuration, but the underlying link works the same regardless of how it's shared.

4. A friend opens the link.

When someone the referrer shared with clicks the link, it takes them to a static referral landing page. This page is hosted by Soreto — it isn't a page on your own storefront — but it's built from your campaign's own images and copy, so it reads as an extension of your brand rather than a generic third-party page. It explains the offer: what the friend gets, and how to claim it.

5. The friend makes a purchase.

The landing page presents the friend with a discount code tied to that specific referral. The friend takes that code to your store and completes a purchase with it, the same way they would with any other discount code at checkout.

6. Both sides get rewarded.

Once that purchase happens and the referral is tracked as valid, Soreto automatically issues a reward to both people — the referrer who shared the link, and the friend who used it. Each reward is a real discount code generated directly in your Shopify store, not something Soreto tracks separately outside Shopify. What each side actually receives, and whether it's available immediately or expires on a schedule, is entirely a function of how you've configured your campaign's reward structure — see Setting Up Rewards for the details.

That's the whole loop. From your side, none of the steps in the middle require manual work — once a campaign is live, Soreto handles presenting the invitation, generating the link, rendering the landing page, and issuing both rewards on its own.

Common questions

• Does a customer need an account to refer a friend? No. Referring a friend only requires a first name and an email address — there's no login, password, or account creation involved for either the referrer or the friend.
• Can the same friend use a referral link twice? It depends on how the friend discount code is configured for that campaign — some setups use single-use codes, while others draw from a rotating pool of codes, which behave differently in this respect. See Setting Up Rewards for how the different code types work.
• Does the friend need to click through the referrer's exact link every time, or can they just use the code shown on the landing page? The referral is tracked through the link, but the actual purchase happens with the discount code the landing page presents — the friend applies that code at checkout like any other code.
• What if the friend already visited my store before seeing the referral link? That doesn't prevent the referral from working. What matters for tracking is that the friend follows the referrer's link and completes their qualifying purchase using the discount code from the referral landing page.