What is Soreto?

Soreto is a referral marketing app for Shopify. It turns your existing customers into a word-of-mouth marketing channel by giving them an easy, on-brand way to invite their friends to your store — and it rewards both sides automatically when that invitation turns into a sale.

You don't have to build any of that yourself. Soreto handles the sharing experience, the referral link, the friend-facing landing page, the discount codes, and the tracking that connects a friend's purchase back to the customer who referred them. Your job is to configure how the program looks and behaves — what it says, what it rewards, and where it appears on your store — which is what the rest of this help center walks you through.

The two participant roles

Every referral involves two people, and Soreto treats them differently:

The referrer is an existing customer of yours — typically someone who has just completed a purchase. They're the person doing the inviting.
The friend is the person the referrer invites: someone new to your store who follows the referral link, and, if everything goes as intended, becomes a customer too.

Both roles get a reward when a referral converts, but the rewards don't have to be the same. You configure the referrer's reward and the friend's reward separately, so you're free to structure the incentive however makes sense for your business — for example, a smaller "thank you" for the referrer and a larger first-purchase discount for the friend, or the reverse. That configuration lives in the Setting Up Rewards collection.

The basic loop

At a high level, a single referral moves through the same sequence every time:

A customer completes a purchase on your store.
Soreto shows them an invitation to share, using one of your campaign's active placements — a floating widget, an inline card, the thank-you page, or the order status page. (Each placement is covered in detail in the Widgets & Placements collection — this article deliberately doesn't get into where each one appears or how to enable it.)
The customer accepts the invitation and gets a personal referral link, which they share with a friend through whichever channel is easiest for them.
The friend opens that link. It takes them to a static referral landing page, hosted by Soreto, that explains the offer using your campaign's own branding and copy.
The friend makes a purchase using the discount code shown on that landing page.
Once the referral is tracked as valid, both the referrer and the friend automatically receive their reward — a real discount code, generated in your Shopify store, that they can use on a future purchase (or, depending on how you've configured it, immediately).

Nothing in that loop requires you to manually generate a code or manually check who referred whom — Soreto's tracking and Shopify's discount code system do that work in the background once your campaign is live.

What you configure

Two things make each merchant's referral program different, and both are fully configurable:

Rewards — the type and value of the discount each side receives, and how their discount codes are generated. See Setting Up Rewards.
Campaigns — the schedule, copy, images, and reward structure that make up a specific referral program you run. A campaign is the unit you actually create and launch in the app. See Creating & Managing Campaigns.

If you're setting up Soreto for the first time, the next article in this collection — Installing and Launching Your First Campaign — walks through the concrete steps to get your first campaign live.

Common questions

Does a customer need to buy something before they can refer a friend? In the standard loop, yes — the invitation to share is triggered around checkout (thank-you page, order status page) or shown elsewhere on your store via the floating widget or inline card. Exactly which placements are active is up to your campaign configuration; see Widgets & Placements.
Are the referrer and friend rewards required to be the same? No. You set each one independently when you configure your campaign's reward structure.
Where do the discount codes come from? They're generated automatically in Shopify once a referral qualifies for a reward — you don't create them by hand. See Setting Up Rewards for how the underlying code types work.