ReferralCandy

ReferralCandy is the refer-a-friend app for stores, and it's been one since before Shopify had an app store worth the name. It's $39 a month and up, plus a success fee on referred sales that starts at 10.5% and falls as the subscription rises, and it works. The two things to know before you install it are in the cancellation article, not the pricing page: cancelling deletes all your data immediately and irreversibly, and uninstalling the Shopify app doesn't cancel the billing.

I haven't run a program on ReferralCandy. This is a research listing, from referralcandy.com (pricing, integrations) and its help centre, plus Shopify App Store and Capterra reviews. Third-party claims are marked.

The history

ReferralCandy is made by Anafore, a Singapore company, and dates to 2009 (third-party on the founding year), which makes it one of the oldest referral tools still selling. It grew with Shopify, and for a long stretch "add a refer-a-friend program to your store" meant installing ReferralCandy.

The model it sells is the one PayPal proved in 2000: pay existing customers to bring in new ones. PayPal paid $10 to the referrer and $10 to the new user, and by the accounts of the people who ran it, spent tens of millions of dollars that way to get to the user base eBay bought. That's the give-get referral, and it works because a recommendation from a friend arrives with trust the brand can't buy. ReferralCandy packages the mechanics: the share link, the reward to both sides, the tracking, the payout. The success fee is how it gets paid for the trust.

Who it's for

Stores on Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Squarespace or Magento with repeat customers who like the product enough to tell people. Referral programs work on love; if your customers buy once and never think of you again, no tool fixes that.

Stores that want rewards in the customer's currency of choice. Through Tremendous, referrers can take gift cards, prepaid Visa, PayPal, Venmo, Cash App or Amazon, and store credit is there for the ones who'd rather shop.

Subscription stores. Recharge and a dozen other subscription apps are integrated, which matters for the fee calculation below.

Who should skip it

Anyone who might want their data later. See the cancellation section.

Anyone who confuses a referral program with an affiliate program. ReferralCandy is customers referring friends: no affiliate marketplace, no multi-tier, no per-affiliate custom rates. If you want creators and publishers, that's UpPromote or Social Snowball.

Anyone selling high-ticket subscriptions. The success fee applies to a referred customer's first three orders, and a 2021 Shopify reviewer who'd used it for seven-plus years found those three orders stretched across roughly eight years of a subscriber's life. More below.

Anyone who wants a refund if it doesn't work. Zero refunds, per the help centre.

Pricing, decoded

Four tiers, same features on all of them, full API on all of them. What changes is the subscription and the success fee:

• Basic: $39 a month plus 10.5%.
• Grow: $79 plus 3.5%.
• Scale: $249 plus 1.5%.
• Enterprise: $799 plus 0.25%.

Extra stores are $20 a month each. Monthly billing only. Seven-day trial, and the clock starts when you activate, not when you install.

The success fee is charged on the subtotal (after discounts) of a net-new referred customer's first three orders. Not every order, not forever: three. That's fairer than a perpetual percentage, and it's also the thing that made the 2021 reviewer leave: on a subscription product, "first three orders" is three renewals, and for a long-lived subscriber those can be years apart, so the fee follows the customer long after the referral did its job.

Now the crossover arithmetic, because the "cheapest" tier is usually the wrong one:

• Basic beats Grow until $571 a month in referred sales. Above that, Grow is cheaper.
• Grow beats Scale until $8,500 a month.
• Scale beats Enterprise until $44,000 a month.

Worked example at $5,000 a month in referred sales: Basic is $39 plus $525, so $564. Grow is $79 plus $175, so $254. The $39 plan costs you $310 a month more than the $79 plan. At $15,000: Grow is $604, Scale is $474. Pick the tier from your referred-sales number, and move up the moment you cross the line, because the fee is billed in arrears and there's no refund for the month you should have switched.

Cancellation: read this before you install

From ReferralCandy's own help centre: cancelling your account deletes all data immediately and irreversibly. Not after 30 days, not "archived." Gone. Referral history, advocate list, reward records.

Also from the help centre: uninstalling the Shopify app does not cancel billing. You have to cancel inside ReferralCandy. A February 2026 Shopify reviewer says she was auto-enrolled, charged $29 without using it, uninstalled, kept being charged, and was refused a refund. One review, but it matches the documented behaviour exactly.

And success fees are billed in arrears after you leave, for referred orders that landed before you cancelled.

So the exit sequence matters more here than for any other tool in this category: export first, settle rewards second, cancel in ReferralCandy third, uninstall fourth. The order is in "If you're leaving" below.

What it does well

The referral mechanics are mature. Share links, give-get rewards, "Flexitiers" that raise the reward as a customer refers more, fraud checks, and a referral widget that's been tuned on more stores than most of its competitors have had customers.

Payout choice. Tremendous covers gift cards, prepaid Visa, PayPal, Venmo, Cash App and Amazon; only the virtual cards are free of Tremendous fees, so pick the default with that in mind. PayPal direct, bank through Tremendous, store credit, and manual CSV are all there.

The integration list is wide for a referral tool: Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Squarespace, Magento 2, Klaviyo, Omnisend, Brevo, Mailchimp, Customer.io, Recharge and 12 other subscription apps, GA4, Meta, AdRoll, Zapier.

Same features at every tier. You're not paying $249 to unlock a thing. You're paying $249 to cut the percentage.

Lock-in: 3 out of 5

What gets you out: a referral purchase report in CSV or PDF, an affiliate list per campaign, an affiliate revenue CSV, and a full API. Monthly billing.

What keeps you in: no advocate export and no payout export in the standard reports (Shopify merchants only, per the help centre), so the "who's referred whom and what have I paid them" record needs the API or doesn't come out. The deletion-on-cancel rule turns a missed export into a permanent loss. And the success fees trailing after cancellation mean you're still paying for a program you've left.

Three. Monthly and API-accessible, but the data has a self-destruct button and it's labelled "Cancel."

Gotchas

• Cancelling deletes everything, immediately. Export before you touch the button.
• Uninstalling the Shopify app doesn't stop billing. Cancel in ReferralCandy first.
• Success fee on the first three orders, including subscription renewals. On a long-lived subscription, that's years.
• Success fees bill in arrears after you leave.
• Zero refunds.
• Seven-day trial starts on activation. Don't activate until you're ready to test.
• Basic is the expensive plan above $571 a month in referred sales. Do the crossover math.
• Only virtual gift cards are free through Tremendous. Other rails carry fees.
• No advocate or payout export in the standard reports. API or nothing.
• Backend "not intuitive" per a 2025 Capterra reviewer who otherwise gave four stars; a 2026 Shopify reviewer had trouble configuring subscriptions, resolved by support.
• $20 a month per extra store.

Integrations

Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Squarespace, Magento 2, Klaviyo, Omnisend, Brevo, Mailchimp, Customer.io, Recharge and a dozen subscription apps, GA4, Meta, AdRoll, Zapier (HubSpot via Zapier). Tremendous for rewards. Full API.

Not supported: Stripe-billed SaaS, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, course platforms, multi-tier.

If you're leaving

In this order. One: export the referral purchase report, the affiliate lists for every campaign, and the affiliate revenue CSV, and pull advocates and payouts through the API if you need them. Two: settle every pending reward, because the Tremendous and PayPal rails are yours to close out. Three: cancel inside ReferralCandy, not by uninstalling, and keep the confirmation. Four: uninstall the app. Five: expect one more invoice for success fees on orders that landed before the cancellation. If you do step three before step one, there is no step one.

And if you'd rather not do any of this yourself, moving a program without losing its affiliates is a service I offer.

Verdict

My opinion, labelled as such: ReferralCandy is a competent, long-running refer-a-friend tool, and for a store with customers who'd tell their friends anyway, the give-get mechanics and the integration list earn the subscription. The success fee is fair on one-off purchases and unfair on subscriptions, and the tier you should be on is set by your referred-sales number, not by the lowest price on the page.

The reason I'd hesitate isn't the product. It's the exit: deletion on cancel, billing that survives an uninstall, and fees that trail you out the door. Those are policies, not bugs, and they're documented, so read them as the vendor telling you what it values.

If what you want is customers turning into affiliates at checkout rather than a refer-a-friend widget, Social Snowball at $249 does that on Shopify with an export. If you want a referral program for a business that isn't a store, Referral Rock exports everything and takes 0%. And if you're on Shopify and want to spend nothing to find out whether referrals work for you at all, UpPromote's free plan will tell you before you commit to a percentage.

Last verified November 4, 2026. Tier prices and success-fee terms from referralcandy.com/pricing. Cancellation, billing and export behaviour from the ReferralCandy help centre. Integrations from referralcandy.com/integrations. Founding details and the PayPal referral history are third-party and from public record. Reviews referenced from the Shopify App Store (2021 to 2026) and Capterra (2025), third-party. The author has not used ReferralCandy.