This article outlines common issues and the troubleshooting steps related to referral detection.

Purchases not detected

Note: Referral detection can take up to 12 hours if you recently set up or tested your campaign.

If your test purchase is taking longer than 12 hours to appear, go through the following checklist:

Check if your store's integration with ReferralCandy is working. Make sure that you correctly follow the integration articles. If you're a non-Shopify merchant using the email integration, check these two points:
- For email forwarding, verify that the referred friend's purchase appears on the Purchases & Referrals page
- For the tracking code, check that the last detected time is later than the time the friend's purchase was made on the Integrations page
Check that the test referral was carried out correctly. Make sure to review and properly follow the testing the referral process article.
Your referral test may have been blocked or flagged by the system's fraud detection measures. These work in two tiers:
- Blocked outright (never counted, never shown): the referred friend's details are an exact match for the advocate's — the same name, the same email address, or the advocate's own referral code; the referred friend is already an existing customer in your store; or the friend was already referred by someone else.
- Flagged as suspicious (detected, but held for review): names or email addresses that are close but not identical, or several referred purchases from the same IP address or device. A flagged purchase still appears on the Purchases & Referrals page with a Suspicious badge and an extended review period — so if you see it there, it was detected. How to handle fraud explains how to review it.
  In Fraud Center, a close name or email match is labelled Self Referral. So a self-referral you can actually see and decide on is always the close-match kind — an exact match is blocked earlier and never shows up as a referral at all.
- Test-specific checks: clear cookies before conducting the referral test, and don't use the same device and network for both viewing the referral link and making the test purchase. If you see “SAMPLE” when opening the referral link during testing, repeat the test using a different network (different public IP, such as cellular data, a personal hotspot, or another network that uses a different ISP), then try again.
Check that the referred purchase meets the criteria for reward eligibility. The referred purchase should:
- Be an amount equal to or higher than the minimum purchase amount
- Meet the required number of purchases that counts towards a referral reward
- Reach the minimum number of rewards to reach a reward tier, if your campaign uses a tiered reward structure
Check if the referral reward is valid.
- The referral reward may be expired, if you set an expiry date
- For merchants who aren't on Shopify or BigCommerce, your single-use coupons may have run out. Manually add more coupons to your campaign's rewards pages.
Your campaign may have stopped. Make sure that your campaign is active, and not paused or stopped. If there are issues preventing your campaign from running, resolve them first. Learn more

Still having trouble with referral detection?

Our support team can investigate further — just let us know, and include the following information:

Advocate's email address
Advocate's name
Referred friend's email address
Referred friend's name
Referred purchase time
Referred purchase amount
Did you follow the testing the referral process article? [Yes or No]
Was the referred friend a new customer? [Yes or No]
Did you carry out the test on a different computer? [Yes or No]
Did you carry out the test on a different network? [Yes or No]

Blocked rewards

If an advocate or affiliate didn't receive a referral reward, review the following checklist:

Referrals are not being detected. See the Purchases not detected section above to troubleshoot why referred purchases are not detected, thus blocking referral rewards.
Check if the referred friend is already an existing customer at your store. Existing customers can't be newly referred by advocates and affiliates. A friend who was already referred isn't affected — they stay linked to their original advocate, and their repeat purchases still show that advocate as the referrer. Whether a repeat purchase earns the advocate another reward depends on your reward conditions.
Check that the referred purchase meets the criteria for reward eligibility. The referred purchase should:
- Be an amount equal to or higher than the minimum purchase amount
- Meet the required number of purchases that counts towards a referral reward
- Reach the minimum number of rewards to reach a reward tier, if your campaign uses a tiered reward structure
The referral may have been blocked or flagged by the system's fraud detection measures.
A referral is blocked outright when the referred friend's details are an exact match for the advocate's (same name, email address, or referral code) or the friend isn't a new customer — blocked referrals never earn a reward, and they don't appear in Fraud Center. A referral whose details are close but not identical, or one sharing the advocate's device or network, is flagged as suspicious instead and held in an extended review period for you to review — in Fraud Center that flag is labelled Self Referral, and the decision is yours. See How to handle fraud.
The advocate and the referred friend may be the same person. This usually comes from a signup mistake: your customer typed someone else's email address when signing up as an advocate, so ReferralCandy enrolled that person as the advocate instead. A purchase by that same person is then blocked as an exact self-referral — it never counts and never earns a reward. You can still credit it to the right advocate: see Crediting a purchase to the right advocate below.
The referred friend may have not clicked the referral link. The friend may have made the purchase at your store, but not through the unique referral link shared by the advocate or affiliate. To fix this, mark the purchase as referred on Shopify or other platforms.

Still having trouble with blocked rewards?

If you'd like ReferralCandy to investigate further into your referral detection issue, just let us know and include the following information:

Advocate's email address
Advocate's name
Referred friend's email address
Referred friend's name
Referred purchase time
Referred purchase amount
Was the referred friend a new customer? [Yes or No]

Crediting a purchase to the right advocate

If a referred purchase was blocked, or the credit went to the wrong person, you can link that purchase to the right advocate from Purchases & Referrals. What's possible depends on whether an advocate has already been credited for it.

If no advocate is credited yet — for example the purchase was blocked as a self-referral, or was never detected as referred — you can link it at any time after the purchase. The person you're crediting needs their own advocate record first, so if they signed up under the wrong email address, ask them to sign up again using their own.

If another advocate is already credited, you have to remove that referral before you can link the purchase to someone else — a referred friend can only be linked to one advocate at a time. This is only possible while the purchase is still within its review period. See deleting a purchase and disqualifying a referral on Shopify or other platforms.

Important: Once the review period ends, the advocate has already been rewarded — and a reward that's been issued can't be recalled, since they may have already redeemed it. If you need to move a referral after that point, let us know and we'll check what's still possible.

To link the purchase, go to Purchases & Referrals, find it, and click Select referrer. Full steps are in marking a purchase as referred on Shopify or other platforms.

Note: Check that the campaign is active before you link the purchase. On a paused or stopped campaign, the reward can be delayed or marked as non-rewardable.

Employee orders detected as referrals

Orders placed by store employees may be detected as referrals by the system. This may happen when an employee views the referral link before placing an order on behalf of the customer. To prevent this:

Ensure that your employees view referral links on a device, network, or browser different from the one used to place an order on behalf of the customer.
Request to ban your office IP address from making referrals. Let us know the IP address of your office or call center and the ReferralCandy team can process the request. Note that once banned, you can't make test purchases using your office network.
Remove the referral that was detected accidentally. You have 2 options:
- Delete the purchase from your account. This is possible while the purchase is still within the review period.
- If the referred purchase has passed the review period, let us know and our team can remove it from the backend.

Note: ReferralCandy won't be able to recall any rewards that have already been issued to customers.

Referral detection FAQ

Are successful referrals detected automatically?

Yes. Once set up, the ReferralCandy app monitors and detects* successful referrals automatically.

However, it may take a couple of hours after a purchase has taken place for the platform to run through all the necessary verification checks, so it isn't instantaneous.

Each advocate receives a unique referral link to share with their friends. A successful referral is tracked when a friend clicks the referral link, the JavaScript tracking code on the purchase completed page is triggered, and the purchase information is sent to the system.

*Note: For eCommerce platforms with specific integration plugins (e.g., Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce), the ReferralCandy app obtains information directly from the platform. The unique referral link together with the information obtained from the platform enables the app to track sales that come from referrals.

Does a referred friend need to click the referral link again to use the friend offer discount?

When referred friends or referees click an advocate or affiliate's referral link but don’t make a purchase immediately, they may still be able to apply the friend offer coupon depending on their browser cookies.

ReferralCandy's cookie is set to last up to 1 year from the moment the referral link is clicked. If the referred friend returns within that time, they can still use the friend offer without clicking the referral link again — but only as long as they accepted the cookies, didn’t clear them, and are on the same device and browser. If any of those change, they should open the referral link again before buying.

How long does a referral link keep tracking?

ReferralCandy uses more than one method to connect a purchase back to an advocate, so there isn't a single countdown that applies to every referral. When a referred friend opens an advocate's referral link, ReferralCandy can remember that visit for up to a year, and that isn't something you can change from your dashboard.

In practice, tracking is most reliable when the friend buys soon after opening the referral link, on the same device and browser. The longer the gap — and the more they switch devices, browsers, or networks in between — the less certain the match becomes.

So the most useful thing you can do is encourage your advocates to share their referral link. Opening that link is what creates the connection ReferralCandy tracks, and it's what gives you the referral history behind each purchase.

Troubleshooting referral detection