ReferralCandy doesn't offer the single-use coupon as an option for the friend offer to prevent coupon code misuse and mitigate administrative burden on merchants.
Why a single-use coupon is impractical
Administrative burden
When a single-use friend offer coupon code is used for your referral program, you'll have to deal with the tedious task of managing the coupons on the admin side:
You need to create hundreds or thousands of single-use coupon codes for the referred friends, associated with each Advocate enrolled in your referral campaign.
Because of the volume of your friend offer coupons, monitoring the coupons becomes a time-consuming process, especially when misuse or fraud is identified.
Each time a user clicks on a referral link, the referred friend sees a single-use friend offer coupon that they can apply to a purchase. Here's where it gets tricky:
Misuse prevention. A user can click the same referral link or multiple links without limits to obtain a single-use code from your coupon database
New customer verification. It would be difficult to identify that the user applying the coupon code is a new customer
Difficulty in preventing misuse
If you use a single-use friend offer coupon code, you'll end up having to constantly generate and upload single-use friend offer coupon codes. When misuse is discovered, it's also going to be difficult to identify which ones were distributed legitimately or which ones you want to invalidate.
Difficulty in identifying new customers
Most merchants prefer that the friend offer is available only to non-customers to attract new customers to the store, rather than being repeatedly redeemed by existing customers.
How do you currently restrict coupon code usage to new customers only?
If you don't have a solution, introducing a single-use friend offer coupon is not the remedy, and it may even complicate things further as explained above
If you have a solution, then the multi-use friend offer coupon should work just as well at a fraction of the administrative hassle
The most common solution shared by ReferralCandy merchants is verifying that the customer is a new customer at the point of checkout when they apply the coupon code. That's when the contact information about the user is collected, which allows you to run checks against your database of existing customers. Please check with your provider directly to see if this is possible.
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