Referrals are a powerful marketing tool on your website. Loyal customers can refer new friends while receiving rewards for spreading the word. This creates an amazing cycle of referrals that can keep business streaming in. Although this may seem very simple, there are many ways to implement this depending on your product, strategy, and branding. In this article, we’re exploring the differences between SC Conjured Referrals and Referral Candy, two highly rated Shopify apps powering this marketing tool. We’ll base our comparison on four major categories that we hear the most about from Shopify businesses like yourself. 

SC Conjured Referrals vs. Referral Candy display and branding 

SC Conjured Referrals: Through our app listing and user experience, we made an effort to show that custom branding is at the top of our mind. There is a builder included in the app if you aren’t looking for anything out of the ordinary, but if you are, the sky's the limit. With a custom design, your program can boast a fully integrated feel with the rest of your website.  

SC Conjured Referrals offers 3 display types: 

1. Custom Page.
2. Post-purchase Modal.
3. Post-purchase Email. 

What’s nice about the Custom Page is that it’s actually a small bit of widget code you can place in a variety of locations, one of them being on a page of its own. This means headless Shopify stores can use this widget or it can be placed in a custom section on a page. We also offer the ability to create multiple campaigns to cater to different customer groups or A/B test incentives. There is an abundance of customization that can be done here.  

Referral Candy: Once you land within the app, you can see the simple Referral Candy branding is enough to launch in moments. You can dig a bit deeper to add things like a banner, logo, and change the font or single primary color. Referral Candy offers 2 display types - Custom Page and Post-purchase Email. They actually provide these together for greater coverage. You have just one campaign that all customers see if you aren’t in need of multiple. This provides a quick setup focused entirely on customers you know have purchased before. Quick, straightforward, with little room for error. 

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SC Conjured Referrals vs. Referral Candy ease of setup and customer service 

SC Conjured Referrals: Getting set up with the available controls and builder means you can find yourself with a fully functioning program fairly quickly. You might want to spend a couple of hours tweaking the appearance and testing depending on your desired specifications. If you are looking to take advantage of our customization services, you’ll start with our small and talented support team. Depending on your design needs is where the time may come in, but we are more than ready to walk you through the entire process and refine it as much as you need.  

Our support is based in the U.S., English speaking, and available 7-days a week during daylight hours. Since we’re a small team, you will most likely have the same person for all your needs who is familiar with you and your business. This comes with an elevated level of understanding as we work together.  

Referral Candy: The setup process is mostly done by the time you arrive on the app. They boast “one more step” to launching if you don’t change any of the settings in place. Even if you decide to make edits, it would be difficult to make this more than a day or so. They offer a 24-hour chat bubble on their site, English speaking. A large team is always on call, which means more immediate responses on any urgent questions or needs. 

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SC Conjured Referrals vs. Referral Candy customization of rewards and reward mechanics 

SC Conjured Referrals: You can easily set up automatically-created discount codes for the advocate and their friends. You can limit these to apply to certain items, specify an expiration date, and an order minimum. If you are a Shopify Plus store, you can enable automatic gift card codes for stackable rewards. Additionally, you can set an Advocate Reward Ratio. This means for every five, 10, 15 successful referrals, you can send one larger reward to incentivize more referrals. We also offer two campaign goal types, one to reward advocates for more purchases and another for more newsletter signups (for prelaunch stores). 

Read: 5 inspiring referral marketing programs to learn from.

Referral Candy: You can also set up easy, automatic discount codes here. They have “cash reward” as an option which requires integrating your credit card to reimburse advocates out of pocket if you don’t want to give them a discount code. Additionally, they offer the ability to reward the advocate beyond the first purchase. You can have this tracked for the foreseeable future, and the advocate is rewarded for every friend purchase or just the first purchase. By default, this is set to one, although you can extend this dramatically. 

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SC Conjured Referrals vs. Referral Candy pricing 

SC Conjured Referrals: We offer a 30-day free trial to get fully set up and comfortable with the app. Our pricing structure is based on referred revenue.The tiers are $29/month for up to $500 in referred revenue, $99/month for up to $2,000 in referred revenue, and $299 for unlimited referred revenue. Each monthly fee is meant to be dramatically outweighed by the revenue you see coming in. We don’t take any commission of sales or tack on fees for support or customization. 

This is also flexible, if you ever want to downgrade for a slow month, you have the freedom to do so and we’ll let you know when it’s time to upgrade. Referral Candy: They also offer a 30-day trial to get rolling and test things out. 

Boost revenue and reward your customers.

Referral Candy: Has a single $59/month Premium while taking a commission off your referred revenue, or a Plus Plan at $299/month. This is based on the idea that your success means their success. While this can be quite small at the start, it’s worth noting that when you start to see significant growth in your program, this also means Referral Candy is taking a larger and larger cut at the end of the day. 

In conclusion, both are fantastic apps with some key differences. If you are looking for detailed control of your branding and implementation, SC Conjured Referrals is the way to go. If you want a program set up with little decisions along the way, Referral Candy can definitely be a great solution. Both are unique in their own ways and we always encourage store owners to explore free trials to verify their tools as ideal long-term solutions.  

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