Referrals & rewards
Merchants could build referral and rewards programs but couldn't see how they performed. I added simpler page setup and analytics right on the program lists.
- Company
- Recharge
- Role
- Frontend engineer, rewards & loyalty
- When
- 2022–2026
- Stack
- React, TypeScript
The demos here are recreations with fictional brands and fake data. The original work was done at Recharge.
Try it
Change the rewards on the left and watch the customer landing page on the right. Switch the shopper’s country to see the credit in their currency.
Merchant admin · Referral program
Customer who refers
Store credit, set separately for each currency you sell in.
Friend who orders
Storefront · loamcoffee.example/refer
Give 15% off. Get $10.
Share your link with a friend. They get 15% off their first bag, and you get $10 in store credit 14 days after their order ships.
loamcoffee.example/r/JORDAN-7Q2Credit applies to future orders and never expires. One reward per new customer.
Referral performance
Merchants need to know whether a program pays for itself. These analytics sat on the referrals list: referral revenue, referred orders and rewards given, with each month split by whether the friend bought once or started a subscription. Hover or use the arrow keys on the chart to read a month.
Merchant admin · Referral performance
- Referral revenue
- $52,837
- Referred orders
- 1,618 45% started a subscription
- Rewards given
- 1,472 Credit sent to the customer who referred
Revenue from referrals
- One-time orders
- Subscriptions
Show as table
| Month | One-time orders | Subscriptions |
|---|---|---|
| Nov | $1,428 | $899 |
| Dec | $2,448 | $1,364 |
| Jan | $1,904 | $1,054 |
| Feb | $1,836 | $1,178 |
| Mar | $2,006 | $1,488 |
| Apr | $2,414 | $1,860 |
| May | $2,754 | $2,077 |
| Jun | $2,788 | $2,170 |
| Jul | $2,754 | $2,201 |
| Aug | $2,958 | $2,387 |
| Sep | $3,400 | $2,728 |
| Oct | $3,672 | $3,069 |
Rewards performance
Credit only matters if customers come back to use it. On the rewards list, merchants could compare what rewards members spend over their first twelve orders against everyone else, and track credit from issued to redeemed, expired or still owed.
Merchant admin · Rewards performance
- Credit issued
- $67,683
- Credit redeemed
- $46,064 68% of issued
- Credit expired
- $4,061
- Still outstanding
- $17,558 Owed to customers today
By their 12th order, rewards members have spent 57% more than customers who never joined.
- Rewards members
- Not in rewards
Show as table
| Order | Rewards members | Not in rewards |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | $31 | $30 |
| 2 | $60 | $55 |
| 3 | $87 | $76 |
| 4 | $112 | $94 |
| 5 | $135 | $109 |
| 6 | $156 | $122 |
| 7 | $176 | $132 |
| 8 | $195 | $141 |
| 9 | $212 | $148 |
| 10 | $229 | $155 |
| 11 | $244 | $160 |
| 12 | $257 | $164 |
- Days to first use
- 18 Average, after credit is issued
- Credit balance
- $12.40 Average per customer with credit
The problem
Merchants could create rewards and referral programs and add them to customer journeys in the canvas view, but once a program was live they couldn’t see how it was doing outside of a sales bump. Nothing showed the results visually, so they had no data to make educated decisions with.
What I did
Working with a designer, I added two things. First, a simpler way to build the pages customers see: rewards landing pages and referral link pages. Second, analytics on the rewards and referral list pages, so merchants could see how each program was performing at a glance.
Result
Merchants could finally see what their programs were doing. Instead of judging a reward or referral by whether sales bumped, they could check the numbers right from the list, spot which programs were paying off, and adjust the ones that weren’t. The simpler page setup made it quicker to get a new landing page or referral link live.