Which customer referal plugin are you using?

General General Questions
1

I am looking to add customer referal and social sharing plugins which give incentives or coupon codes to referring customers. I have come across a few of them like referralcandy, shopalize, addshoppers, curebit (the most expensive), invitebox and a few others.



Which one would be best in terms of increasing referal sales?



Also wondering which one are you using and how is it working with cs-cart? Please share your opinions.

2

We are not using any yet, but we are curious too.

3

Yeah, almost all the popular ecommerce sites are using referral programs in some way or the other. Saw addshoppers as the only one customized for cs-cart but I am sure there must be plugins even for others like referral candy, shopalize etc.

4

We need to get together and decide which is the best of these, then see if one of the developers here will code an addon for it. I saw shareyourcart mentioned in another thread today, which also looks interesting.



Here's the “About” page for shareyourcart: HugeDomains.com



Seems like the logic here is very good. You not only increase your chances of turning a browser into a shopper, but he/she then becomes a source of free advertising.

5

Just had a look at Shareyourcart, the integration looks fairly straightforward. If there's enough interest, I'll see what can be done with packing it up as an addon, however, it can fairly easily be hardcoded so I may look into it for one of my stores which I think would benefit from social interaction.

6

I opened an account with ShareYourCart. I'm not sure I understand their pricing structure at first glance. The plan is “Free for Life” but there's a place to “buy more coupoons.” So not sure what that's about.



Anyone know how difficult it would be to code an addon for Shopalize?



It looks like ShareYourCart is fairly new…went out of beta last July.

7

I can't find any documentation whatsoever on Shopalize…nothing at all about integration, or perhaps it's hidden away somewhere to entice you to sign up before they tell you how to integrate. Shouldn't be too difficult really.

8

What I like about Shopalize over ShareYourCart is that with the former, your customer gets a benefit (disount or whatever) as well as offering a benefit to any of their friends who respond to the offer. So there is the incentive for your shopper to share with their friends, plus an incentive for the friends to shop with you as opposed to your competitors. I'll sign up for an account and see if I can find out about integration.

9

Here is the integration code.


```php




```



Here is the integration guide:



http://shopalize.com/help/integration#plugins

10

Here's a screenshot from the integration guide page.

shopalize.jpg

11

To integrate that, all you would have to do is add it to scripts.tpl with {literal} tags enclosing it. Better still, add it in as a hook. Not sure exactly what this integration does though. There are various PHP scripts available which you could self-host which provide the same idea - 'share us on facebook/twitter/g+ and get a discount coupon' - which wouldn't cost you anything in fees.

12

Another screen shot from inside Shopalize.

shopalize2.jpg

13

Thanks for the information about Shopalize. How did it work for you? any updates?



I am doing research on starting an referral / affiliate program and so far my choices are:



OSI Affiliate Software - http://www.osiaffiliate.com



Hasoffers - http://www.hasoffers.com



GetAbassador - https://getambassador.com/



This is my current short list after a lot of research.



Does anyone have any feedback about these referral solutions? What are the type of features I should be looking for?



Thanks.