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How to manually attribute a referred customer to an affiliate
How to manually attribute a referred customer to an affiliate
Kyle Fox avatar
Written by Kyle Fox
Updated over a week ago

It's possible with Rewardful to associate an existing Stripe customer with an affiliate, and even generate commissions for past invoices (past payments processed in Stripe).

When do I need to manually attribute a referred customer?

Sometimes a customer will sign up through an affiliate in a way that cannot be tracked by Rewardful. For example, a visitor might discover your product by following an affiliate link on their smartphone, but then sign up later by visiting your website directly on a laptop.

In these cases, you can connect the Stripe customer to the affiliate manually so the affiliate gets commissions on future invoices. Rewardful also lets you generate commissions that the customer already paid.

How you manually attribute customers to an affiliate depends on whether you've connected your Stripe account to Rewardful with read-write access (the default) or read-only access.

With Stripe connected with read-write access

1. Copy the affiliate's token

Login to your Rewardful dashboard and find the affiliate you want to give credit for the customer. When you've found the affiliate, click the "Links" tab and copy one of their link tokens to your clipboard.

Usually an affiliate will have only one token, but in this example the affiliate has three tokens. If the affiliate has multiple tokens, it doesn't matter which token you chose.

2. Add the affiliate token to the Stripe customer

Login to your Stripe dashboard and go to the Customers section and find the customer you want to attribute to the affiliate. Scroll down to the "Metadata" section and click the "Edit" button. Select in the preset list the choice referral in the box on the left, and paste the affiliate token from Step #1 into the right box. Then hit the "Save" button.

3. Generate the commission

After adding the token of the affiliate to the customer, refresh the page and in the Metadata section, click on the link under View in Rewardful.

Once in the Rewardful page, click the Generate commission button to manually generate the commission.

With Stripe connected with read-only access

The instructions for accounts with read-only access are very similar to the instructions for read-write access. The main difference is that instead of copying the link token (Step 1 above) you must generate a new referral ID and paste that value into the Stripe customer metadata.

1. Generate a new referral ID

Login to your Rewardful dashboard and find the affiliate you want to give credit for the customer. When you've found the affiliate, click the "Links" tab. Beside each link is a "Create a referral..." button. Click this button beside the link you want to attribute the referral to:

Click this button and you'll see a popup that displays the key (referral) and value (the referral ID) that you'll paste into the customer metadata in Stripe:

2. Add the referral to the Stripe customer

Login to your Stripe dashboard and find the customer you want to attribute to the affiliate. Scroll down to the "Metadata" section and click the "Edit" button. Type "referral" into the box on the left, and paste the referral from Step #1 into the right box. Then hit the "Save" button.

How to confirm it worked

Once you've completed the steps above, head back to your Rewardful dashboard and click on the "Conversions" tab on the affiliate details page. The Stripe customer from Step #2 should appear:

You may need to wait a few moments and refresh the page before the customer shows up in Rewardful.

Generating commissions for past invoices

Rewardful will automatically generate commissions for future invoices, but you may want to generate commissions from invoices already paid by the customer (i.e. invoices they paid before you manually associated them with an affiliate).

It's easy to have Rewardful generate commissions for past invoices:

  1. Click on the customer's name in Rewardful to view details.

  2. Click the "Generate commission" button for the invoices you wish.

  3. The page will refresh and show you the newly created commission.

Note: If you are also implementing a double-sided incentive, manually add the coupon code in the customer's Stripe record.

We hope you found this article helpful โ€” as always, please feel free to reach out to us by chat or via hello@getrewardful.com if you have any questions or suggestions!

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