Referrals
Members get a personal invite link and earn something when the people they bring start shopping. Cashback Tracker → Settings → Members → Referrals.
Off by default, and deliberately so: every setting below defaults to zero, so switching the feature on costs you nothing until you decide what it is worth.
How one referral works
A member copies their invite link from the Refer a friend tab and sends it to somebody.
The friend clicks it. A cookie records the code — no account, no query, nothing else happens yet.
The friend registers. The relationship is written, along with the terms in force at that moment.
The friend shops. Once their approved cashback reaches your qualifying amount, the one-off bonuses are paid to both of them.
If you set a percentage share, the referrer keeps earning a cut of that friend's cashback from then on.
The settings
Enable referrals
The invite link, the member tab, the cookie and the bonuses all appear and disappear together
Attribution window (days)
How long after clicking an invite link a visitor still counts as referred when they register. Default 30
Bonus for the referrer
Paid once, when their friend qualifies. 0 disables it
Bonus for the new member
Paid once, on the same event. 0 disables it
Share of referred cashback (%)
An ongoing cut of every approved cashback that friend earns. 0 disables it
Qualifying cashback
How much approved cashback the friend must earn before the one-off bonuses are paid
Time to qualify (days)
How long they have to reach it, counted from registration. 0 means no limit
Amounts below zero and shares above 100 are refused with a message. Neither fails loudly on its own: a negative bonus quietly debits the referrer every time their friend buys something, and a share above 100 pays more for the introduction than the sale earned, on every order, forever.
Terms are frozen when the relationship is made
Whatever the settings say on the day a friend registers is what that pair settles under, permanently.
This is what makes the feature safe to tune. Raise your bonus and only new relationships get the new figure; lower it and nobody who already qualified is asked for money back. Without the snapshot, every bonus is recalculated against today's settings — and because bonuses are written as corrections toward a target, lowering an amount would append a clawback to every past relationship on the site at once.
The one thing that keeps applying is the qualifying threshold. If a friend's cashback is later reversed and drops them back under it, the bonuses come back off. That asymmetry is on purpose: an expiring window must not claw back a bonus already earned, but reversed cashback must.
Setting the threshold
A meaningful bonus with no qualifying amount is cheap to farm. With both at zero, one approved penny of cashback pays out a full bonus to two accounts, and there is nothing stopping one person from being both of them.
The threshold is the defence. Set it high enough that a fake referral costs more in real spending than the bonus returns.
Time to qualify bounds your exposure rather than your generosity: it stops a relationship from sitting open for years waiting for a bonus you had forgotten you owed. Once reached, qualification never expires.
The member's tab
Refer a friend shows their invite link with a copy button, what they have earned, how many friends they have invited and how many qualified, and the list of those friends.
Names in that list are shortened — Sarah becomes Sara••• — enough for a referrer to recognise somebody they actually invited, not enough to turn the page into a directory of your members. An email address is never shown.
The rules underneath the link are written from your current settings, and only the ones you have actually set appear. Set no bonus and no share, and the block is absent rather than empty.
Earned is not the same as available. A referral bonus inherits the holding period of the cashback that produced it, so Earned from referrals can show an amount that is not yet withdrawable. When some of it is still held, the tab says how much underneath the figure.
Where the invite link points
In order of preference:
The Registration URL from
Settings→General→Tracking links, if you have set one. Use this if a membership plugin or a custom page handles signup on your site.Otherwise the WordPress registration form, since an invite exists to produce a registration.
Unless registration is closed on your site, in which case that form shows nothing but an error, and the link points at your home page instead.
The cookie is set on any page of your site, so attribution survives whichever of these the friend lands on, and whatever they browse before signing up.
Check this against your page cache. An invite link works by running PHP on the first request to set the cookie. If your cache is configured to ignore query strings, it will serve ?ref=CODE from cache, the plugin never runs, and every referral is silently lost with nothing anywhere reporting a problem. Most caches treat a query string as a cache miss by default, which is the behaviour you want here.
The three emails
Friend signed up
The referrer
Somebody registers through their link
Referral bonus
The referrer
That friend qualifies and the bonus is paid
Welcome bonus
The new member
The same moment
The first exists because qualification can be weeks away or never arrive, and the moment a referrer actually cares about — somebody used my link — was passing in silence. It is also the moment they are most likely to send another.
It deliberately does not offer the %BONUS_AMOUNT% tag: nothing has been earned yet, and a tag an email cannot fill arrives as a sentence with a hole in it.
Ongoing percentage payments send nothing. One email per purchase, forever, is not a notification — it is noise.
The Referrals screen
Cashback Tracker → Referrals is every relationship on the site, and it is a fraud screen more than a report.
At the top, your busiest referrers: how many people each brought, how many qualified, and what they have been paid. The bar on each is scaled against the busiest, so the comparison needs no second number. Below that, the relationships themselves, newest first.
Select a referrer — on the strip, or on any Referrer cell in the table — and the list narrows to the people they invited. The strip stays put while filtered, because it is the context the filtered list is read against.
What you are looking for is one name with a great many signups, few or none of which ever qualify. That is the shape of somebody registering their own accounts. A busy referrer whose friends genuinely shop looks completely different on the same screen, and is the member you should be thanking.
The strip hides itself below two referrers, where there is no comparison to draw. A referrer whose account has since been deleted still gets a card, labelled with their id — the relationships outlive the account, and twelve signups from somebody who no longer exists is the most interesting thing this screen can show you.
Referrals on the dashboard
The Overview grows a Referrals line once your site has referred somebody: bonuses paid this month, referred signups, and what share of every relationship belongs to your single busiest referrer.
Referral bonuses are not part of the margin card. Margin is commission minus cashback, and a bonus is neither. On a site running a referral programme, the margin figure is higher than what you actually keep by the whole of what the programme pays out — which is why the referral line names that spend directly.
The share is reported, not alarmed on. One member introducing half of a young site is completely normal, and a warning that fired there would be switched off long before the site was big enough for it to mean anything.
Switching referrals off
Nothing is undone. Existing relationships stay, balances already paid stay, and the Referrals screen still lists everything with a notice saying the feature is off. What stops is the recording of new relationships and the payment of any further bonuses — including ongoing percentage shares.
The member tab disappears, and so does the invite link.
Referrals are also off automatically on a coupon-only site: there is no cashback there for a referrer to earn a share of.
Rehearsing it
The sandbox builds a referral tree among its generated members, so you can watch bonuses arrive against your own settings before a real member ever sees the tab.
It tells you when it cannot: a chain recorded while referrals are switched off, or while every amount is still zero, reports that instead of a count that reads like success.
Related
The cashback ledger — where bonus rows live
Events and hooks —
cbtrkr_referral_attached,cbtrkr_referral_bonus,cbtrkr_signup_bonus,cbtrkr_invite_base_url
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