With FlexiTiers, you can create reward tiers that encourage your advocates to make more referrals and earn better, higher rewards as they hit referral milestones. Tiered rewards gamify your referral or affiliate program and motivate your customers to increase their referral activity — driving new customers and boosting overall sales.

You can configure up to two advocate rewards within the same tier: the main reward plus one additional reward.

Use the tiered reward structure to give your advocates and affiliates more attractive rewards or commissions as they reach higher referral milestones.

New campaigns use Single reward by default, which gives the same reward value from the first earned reward onwards. To create tiers, turn on FlexiTiers first:

To add and set up reward tiers:

You have the following options for how reward tiers progress:

If you want to introduce a new set of tiers and have all advocates begin fresh, set a starting point. Once reward tiers are saved, changes take effect immediately unless you specify a start date. You have two options:

To give an advocate or affiliate one reward when they reach three qualifying referrals, use a single milestone tier. Referrals 1 and 2 earn no reward; referral 3 earns the reward you choose.

This counts the advocate's qualifying referrals across their referred friends. It does not wait for each individual friend's third purchase. For example, two qualifying purchases from Customer A and one from Customer B can reach the milestone if repeat purchases qualify.

A range is different: Start 1, End 3 rewards each of referrals 1, 2, and 3. It does not hold one reward until referral 3. The Keep giving last tier reward option also continues rewarding every referral after the milestone, rather than every third referral.

Choose which purchases qualify separately in Reward conditions. First X purchase(s) = 3 makes each friend's first three purchases eligible; it does not skip the first two.

The Maximum rewards per advocate field sets a lifetime cap for each advocate in this campaign. It counts rewardable referred purchases, not a cash amount. If several eligible purchases are required for one reward, the purchase count and reward count are different. See Reward conditions for the cap calculation.

For the other reward conditions — minimum purchase amount and rewardable purchases — see Reward conditions.

The referral progress email (also called the reward progress email) keeps advocates and affiliates going when a referral succeeds but doesn’t earn them anything yet. It names the exact number of referrals still needed — for example, “You’re just 3 referrals away from earning a free hoodie” — so a tier with no reward reads as progress instead of silence.

The referral progress email sends when both of these are true:

If no later tier carries a reward, the email isn’t sent — there’s nothing left to progress toward. That includes advocates who have gone past your last tier, where every further referral earns nothing.

Timing matches your other reward emails: it goes out once the review period ends and the referred purchase is confirmed, not the moment the friend buys. See When will referral rewards be sent to an advocate?.

You can restyle and reword the referral progress email in your campaign’s Themes editor, under Notification Emails — see Shopify and other platforms. The referral count and the reward name in it are generated from your tier settings: the reward name comes from that tier’s reward description, so edit it there rather than in the email.