We understand that most merchants would like the Friend Offer to be available to new customers only for one-time use to prevent coupon code misuse.
However, we don't offer the Single-Use Coupon Code as an option for the Friend Offer simply because it does not actually address the concern around coupon code misuse while increasing the administrative burden on retailers.
Why is that?
Hypothetically, let's say that there was a Single-Use Friend Offer Coupon Code option, you'd probably need to generate hundreds of coupon codes in your eCommerce platform and upload them into ReferralCandy so that we can distribute them for you.
Each time a person clicked on a referral link, we would show this person one of these Single-Use Friend Offer Coupon Codes. Here's where it gets tricky:
How would you know that this person was indeed a new customer?
What's preventing an individual from clicking on the same referral link (or other various referral links) a couple of times to obtain multiple Single-Use Friend Offer Coupon Codes?
You'd end up having to constantly generate and upload Single-Use Friend Offer Coupon Codes while not actually addressing any of the key questions raised above. Also, if you discovered misuse and needed to invalidate these coupons, you'd have the mammoth task of figuring out which ones (of the hundreds) were distributed legitimately vs. which ones you want to invalidate.
Setting ReferralCandy aside for the moment, the real solution comes from your answer to the following question:
"How do you currently restrict coupon code usage to new customers only?"
If you don't currently have a solution, introducing a Single-Use Friend Offer Coupon Code is not the remedy and is only going to make things messier as per the example above.
If you currently have a solution, then the Multi-Use Friend Offer Coupon Code should work just as well at a fraction of the administrative hassle.
The most common solution that we've heard of from our retailers involves verifying if the customer is a new customer at the point of checkout when the coupon code is being applied. That's when you'll have collected contact information about this individual that will allow you to run checks against your database of existing customers. Please check with your providers directly to see if this is possible.
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