Key Takeaways
- QuackChat now has a referral programme. Share your link, and when someone you sent joins and pays for the first time, you both get something.
- You get $50 in account credit. It comes off your next invoice automatically.
- They get 10% off their first payment. It is applied at checkout without them typing anything.
- There is nothing to remember. Your link carries the code, and we handle the rest from the moment they click it.
- If they clicked on their phone and signed up on their laptop, they can enter the code by hand on the Refer a friend page. It has to go in before they subscribe, and within their first week.
- Rewards are held for a short period before they land, and a refund reverses them. We explain both below rather than letting you find out later.
- All prices in Australian dollars (AUD).
Why we built it
The honest answer is that most of our best customers arrived because somebody they trusted told them to try us. That has been happening for a while without us doing anything about it, and it seemed worth saying thank you properly.
So there is now a referral programme, and it pays both sides. Not a discount code we hand out to everybody, and not a scheme where you have to become an affiliate and manage a dashboard. You share a link. If somebody joins because of it, you both get something.
What each side gets
You get $50 in account credit when someone you referred makes their first payment. Credit sits on your account and comes off your next invoice automatically. There is nothing to redeem and nothing to claim. (If you are billed through Shopify, see the note further down about how that one is issued.)
They get 10% off their first payment. It is applied for them at checkout. They will see the discount on the Stripe payment page before they confirm anything.
This works per person, not per referral. If either of you is billed through the Shopify App Store rather than by us directly, that person gets 10% of their plan price as an app credit instead. Shopify owns the plan and the payment page there, so a discount at our checkout is not something we can apply, and the credit is the equivalent that works inside their billing. The other side is unaffected, so a mixed pair is normal.
How it actually works
Go to Refer a friend in your account. There is a link there with your code already in it. Send it to whoever you like.
From their side:
- They click your link.
- They sign up whenever they get around to it. Same day, next week, it does not matter. The link is good for 30 days from the click.
- When they subscribe, their discount is already applied.
There is no code for them to type and no box for them to find at checkout. The only thing they need to do is use your link.
Your Refer a friend page shows how it is going: how many people clicked, how many signed up, and how many became customers.
If they clicked on one device and signed up on another
This is the one gap worth knowing about, and we have made it fixable rather than pretending it does not exist.
Your link works by leaving a small marker in the browser that clicked it. If somebody taps your link on their phone, then sits down at a laptop later and signs up there, the laptop has never seen the marker. Nothing carries across.
So the same page has a Were you referred? field. They paste the code, we check it, and it is applied the same way. Your link shows the code in plain text underneath it for exactly this reason, and it is built out of characters that do not look like each other, so it survives being read out over the phone or written on paper.
Two things to be clear about. It has to go in before they subscribe, because the discount applies to a first payment and once that payment has been made there is nothing left to take it off. And it has to go in within the first week of them creating their account. We would rather say both plainly here than have somebody find out by losing the discount.
The parts that are less fun to write
Every referral programme has rules. Here are ours, in plain language, because finding them out later is worse.
Rewards are held briefly before they land. When someone you referred pays, your credit is not issued that second. It waits about two weeks, or about a month if you are billed through Shopify. This is not us being slow. It is the window in which a payment can still be reversed, and issuing credit inside it would mean clawing it back from you afterwards, which is a much worse experience than waiting.
On Shopify, a person checks the reward before it is issued. Shopify's own billing does not tell us clearly enough whether a store has really paid, so rather than guess we have someone confirm it. It means a Shopify reward can take a little longer than the wait above.
A refund reverses the reward. If the person you referred gets refunded or disputes the charge, the referral did not result in a customer, and the reward is undone. If it had already been paid to you, it comes off your account. We would rather tell you that up front than surprise you with it on an invoice.
You need an active subscription, or a trial with a card on file, to refer. Free accounts do not get a link. If your subscription lapses, your link stops working until it is active again.
You cannot refer yourself. We check for it, including the obvious variations on your own email address. It is not a moral judgement, it is just that a referral programme that pays people for signing up twice is a discount programme with extra steps.
One referral per new account. Somebody can be referred once, by one person.
What this does not change
Nothing about your plan, your bots or your billing changes because this exists. If you never share your link, nothing happens and nothing is different.
We are also not going to email your contacts, ask you to connect an address book, or add a popup asking you to invite people. The link is on a page in your account. Use it if you want to.
Getting started
Open Refer a friend in your account, copy the link, and send it to one person you think would actually get something out of QuackChat. That is the whole thing.
If you have a question about how a specific case works, reply to any of our emails and a human will answer.