I'm a fan of Refersion overall. Their service is feature rich and their customer service is very responsive. They also come highly recommended by many industry leaders. Their pricing structure is based on the quantity of affiliate sales per month (and not your traffic) which can be attractive for stores who drive a healthy amount of traffic from other sources outside of their affiliate program. They recently got rid of their entry level Starter plan and now only offer an $89/month Professional Plan and a custom priced Enterprise plan. This move might price them out of the budget of small stores, however, if their Professional Plan is within your means, Refersion could be a great choice for you.
Plans & Pricing
Refersion plans offer unlimited affiliates and visits and are limited by the quantity of affiliate sales generated in a month. Their Professional Plan includes up to 130 sales/month, the ability to track sales by discount code, emails, or SKU, and the ability to have custom commission rates for different affiliates or SKUs.
Professional – $89/month for up to 130 affiliate orders/month
Custom – Contact them for custom pricing if your quantity of monthly affiliate sales exceeds their current plan offerings.
Features
Unlimited: Affiliates, Visitors, and Bandwidth
Limited: Plan dependent on quantity of affiliate orders/month
Track Affiliate Sales by URL: Yes (for the most part, this is standard among all services)
Customizable URL: They have an integrated Bitly shortener which the affiliate can use to create custom links to individual products or pages on the site. You cannot customize the affiliate URL directly through Refersion (ie: change the affiliate code from a random string of numbers to “paul” for example). Instead they provide instructions on setting up 301-redirects manually through Shopify, but that's not the same as customizing the URL structure in other options. In general, not a huge factor though.
Track by Discount Code: Yes
Track by Customer E-mail: Yes, but it's not automatic. You can manually assign an affiliate to receive commissions on all sales generated through a customer.
Whitelabel: Refersion offers the ability to whitelabel their services, which means remove all Refersion branding, for a one time fee of $499. This means that the the pages for your affiliate sign up, login, and dashboard pages are all hosted on your domain (as opposed to yourname.refersion.com)
Link to Individual Products: Yes, if enabled. Affiliate has to manually create links in the backend though.
Sub IDs: Yes, used for tracking purposes.
Syncs with Shopify Refunds: Yes, their app syncs with Shopify refunds. You can also manually add negative credits when applicable.
Control Cookie Length: Yes, you can control the length of the cookie period.
Control Cookie Order: No, you can not control the cookie order. With Refersion, the Last Click / Last Affiliate is who receives the commission. This is standard to most affiliate apps, however with some other apps, you can control whether the First Click / First Affiliate or Last Click / Last Affiliate receives the commission.
Commission Type: Percentage of Sale or Flat Rate
Custom Commissions per Product: Yes, you can have different commission offers per product.
Custom Commissions per Affiliate: Yes, you can manually change the commission rate or structure for specific affiliates.
Only Pay For New Customers: This feature is available by request. It allows you to only pay commissions to your affiliates on NEW customers and not for returning customers.
Recurring Commissions: Yes, Referesion offers recurring commissions for subscription products and integrates with Recharge, Chargebee, Bold, and Stripe to make that possible.
Commission Tiers: Refersion recently released a tiered commission feature. Tiered commissions provide commission terms/payouts based on affiliate sales, allowing merchants to provide a gamified structure. So essentially an affiliate can earn a higher percentage commission when their total sales volume increases.
Affiliate Tiers (Sub-Affiliates) – There is only one level of affiliates with Refersion, meaning affiliates cannot recruit sub-affiliates.
Multiple Stores w/ Single Affiliate Login: Yes, you can have your affiliates be able to login to one backend and promote multiple stores that you operate.
Payout Options: PayPal Mass Payments, Gift Card, Manual (checks, cash, donations)
Customers into Affiliates: With this feature, you can automatically turn customers into affiliates with one click. After purchase, the customer is prompted to refer their friends and get a % back (most likely as a gift card, but you can choose that or cash). It's like a built-in referral program as opposed to using a separate referral app.
Integrations: Refersion integrates out-of-the-box with MailChimp and Klaviyo, and to other e-mail services via Zapier.
Zapier Integration: Yes, Refersion integrates with Zapier. With the Refersion – Zapier integration, you can automate certain tasks by automatically creating events in Refersion or having Refersion trigger specific actions in other apps that are connected to Zapier. Zapier works by letting the user create a Zap, which is an automated workflow that connects apps and services together. For example, new affiliates can trigger an event within another connected app, like sending an email, or the insertion of the affiliate’s information into a spreadsheet. External apps can also trigger an action inside Refersion as well, such as to receive order information from other eCommerce platforms. One last example, is that a Google Forms submission can create a new affiliate inside Refersion with the info submitted. Zapier integration is a great feature. The only other app that offers Zapier integration is Shoutout Global.
Affiliate Marketplace
This company has a Refersion Marketplace where brands can be introduced to new potential affiliates. It seems to serve more as a brand directory as opposed to an integrated affiliate network. This means that the affiliate needs to separately apply to each brand's affiliate program and manage their links, commissions, and payouts through the individual brand's affiliate backend. This differs from CJ.com or Clickbank for example in that those affiliate marketplaces allow affiliates to represent multiple stores through one backend. As of March 2018, they have 1744 merchants in the marketplace.
Refersion is also integrated with Viglink and Skimlinks into their Marketplace so that their merchants have access to more affiliates.
About Refersion the Company
Refersion is a small team that operates out of New York City. They are dedicated to building the best tool for running your own network of affiliates. They specialize in enterprise level solutions for e-commerce stores and service over 2000+ merchants.
One thing that separates Refersion from alternatives is their willingness to customize their solution to meet their user's needs and develop new custom features that can benefit the entire community. Their mission is to make it easier than ever for stores to run affiliate programs.
Refersion Alternatives
Compare Refersion to competing Shopify affiliate apps. Choose one below to compare: