Growth programs

Audience: Merchant·Plan: starter·Read: 4 min·Updated: 2026-08-03

In 30 seconds

• Affiliates are partners you recruit and pay a commission. Referrals are customers rewarding customers. They are different motions and have different controls.
• Both share the same spine: attribution that does not depend on a coupon code, an idempotent ledger, clawback on refunds, a fraud queue, and separation of duties on anything that moves money.
• Both surface into the unified revenue attribution ledger, so their contribution appears in your headline numbers rather than only inside their own hub.

Which one do you need?

	Affiliate program	Referral program
Who promotes	Recruited partners, creators, publishers	Your existing customers
What they get	A commission on the orders they drive	A reward, usually a discount or points
Who they reach	Their audience	Their friends
Approval	Partners are approved individually	The programme itself needs approval to launch
Money control	Payout batches with a second approver	A rolling budget cap and a kill switch
Main risk	Coupon leakage to aggregator sites	Self-referral and reward farming
Typical scale	Tens of partners, large individual volumes	Thousands of customers, small individual volumes

Most stores end up running both. They are complementary: affiliates bring audiences you do not have, referrals compound the customers you already have.

🤝Affiliate programstarter

Partner CRM, commission ledger, payouts with maker-checker, fraud queue, creative assets and recruitment.

📣Referral programstarter

Governed customer referrals — launch approval, budget, kill switch, invite campaigns and copy experiments.

What they share

Attribution without the coupon. Both resolve a winner from more than the discount code. An affiliate click sets a session token so a later order still credits the partner; a referral is resolved from the referrer and referee identities. Coupon-only attribution systematically under-counts both channels.

An idempotent ledger. Order webhooks are redelivered on any failure. Both ledgers are keyed so a redelivery cannot double-credit.

Clawback on refunds. A reversed order reverses its commission or reward. Programmes without clawback drift above reality by exactly your refund rate.

A fraud queue. Both have detectors sized to their own risk: coupon leakage and velocity for affiliates, self-referral and refund abuse for referrals.

Separation of duties on money. Affiliate payouts need a different approver; referral launches need a different approver. Both are enforced on user identity, not on permissions held.

One revenue ledger. Both emit credits into the unified attribution ledger, capped and split against other engines claiming the same order — so their contribution appears in the cross-engine headline rather than being double-counted against email or ads.

See also

• Loyalty overview — points, tiers and rewards, which referral economics live inside
• Attribution & revenue — where both programmes' credit lands
• Approval queues — the maker-checker pattern used throughout