Friendbuy 

Referral marketing is a method of promoting products or services to new customers through referrals from customers who have already signed up for your service.

Friendbuy is a referral marketing tool that gets you more customers by providing referrals. Think of it as word-of-mouth marketing for your products and services.

In a refer-a-friend campaign, A REFERRER/ADVOCATE recommends a product/service to a friend inviting them to buy.

Why Referral Campaigns

People seek recommendations from friends and family. Recommendations are reinforced by widespread usage of social media. Customers are prompted to enter a dual incentive (money, product or service, loyalty points, early access, swag etc.). Merchants can track the shares, leverage the best platforms for better outreach and build brand awareness.

Why Chargebee - Friendbuy

The Chargebee - Friendbuy integration helps you track referral purchases and add promotional credits to the Referrer's customer account automatically.

Chargebee notifies all the purchases made by end customers to Friendbuy, along with the customer name, email and purchase amount. Friendbuy detects the referral conversion automatically. Friendbuy applies the configured reward as promotional credits to the referrer's account in Chargebee.

Additionally, the integration provides out of the box validation to ensure that free or trial subscriptions are not cancelled before transitioning to a paid account.

To perform this validation, Friendbuy sets all eligible advocate rewards to pending for 30 days to accommodate trial periods. On day 31, Friendbuy sends a reward notification to Chargebee so that their system can check that the referred friend's account is active and their subscription is paid. The reward is applied to the advocate only after Chargebee confirms that the subscription is valid and active.

Prerequisites 

• Currency of the Referral reward should match the base currency in your Chargebee site. If you have multiple currencies, then the reward currency should match at least one of the currencies in Chargebee.
• You need to sign up for a Friendbuy account.

Steps to Configure - Friendbuy 

Begin with connecting your Chargebee account to Friendbuy and setting up the rewards you would like to offer customers for a successful referral.

Step 1: Configure your Chargebee credentials in Friendbuy

• Login to your Friendbuy account.
• Navigate to Configurations > Integrations > Chargebee.

On the integration page, you will find fields to enter your site name and Chargebee API key. This information will allow Friendbuy to safely connect with your Chargebee site. The link will be fully functional only after you enter your Friendbuy credentials in Chargebee as well (covered in the next section).

• Enter your Sitename ([abc] from abc.chargebee.com).
• Enter your Chargebee API key (which you can find at Settings > Configure Chargebee > API Keys in your Chargebee site).

Step 2: Set up rewards in Friendbuy (Configure your Friendbuy Widget)

In Friendbuy, you can set up a referral widget which will appear on your thank you page (or Chargebee's thank you page, if you using Chargebee's hosted pages) after checkout. Here is a screenshot for reference:

This widget will equip your existing customers (or advocates) with a unique URL that they can share with friends and family. A sign-up to a paid subscription that occurs from a unique URL counts as a successful referral. You can reward successful referrals with cash or Chargebee credit.

To configure your referral widget, follow these steps:

• Navigate to Referral and Sharing > Widgets
• Click on one of Friendbuy pre-configured widgets (you can also click on Create your own widget and follow the steps to customize the look and feel of your widget further).
• Configure a destination URL - this is URL that potential new customers will be directed to if they click on your advocate's unique link.
• Click the Edit option against Reward Configuration to configure the amount that you would like to reward your advocates for successful referrals:
• You can either reward your advocates with cash or chargebee credit. While Chargebee credit will automatically be applied to their customer accounts, you have to see cash rewards through manually.
• Choose a currency that matches at least one of the currencies active in your Chargebee site.
• Choose the number of days you would like to delay the reward by (in case you have a trial period and would like to reward your advocates only after sign ups convert from your free trial to a paid subscription).
• Configure the message that you would like to display on the widget along with social links (if you want to make it easier for your customers to share their unique URLs)
• Your widget is complete! Click Save and Exit to go back. Remember to click the Publish option if you make any further changes.

Steps to Configure - Chargebee 

With your setup in Friendbuy complete, login to your Chargebee site to complete the Chargebee - Friendbuy integration. Follow these steps to configure Friendbuy in Chargebee:

• Navigate to Settings > Third-Party Integrations > Friendbuy

• Enter the following information into the Friendbuy page:

• Your Friendbuy site ID: To find your Friendbuy site ID, navigate to Settings > Integration Code in your Friendbuy site. Your site ID is embedded with the JS code as shown in the screenshot below:

  

• Your Friendbuy Access Key and Secret Key: Navigate to Settings > Configurations > API Access in your Friendbuy site to find your Access Key and your Secret Key

• If you are using Chargebee's hosted Thank you page and would like your referral widget to appear on it after a customer completes their checkout, enable the Post Purchase Referral Widget Display option. If you enable this option, you will have to provide the following information as well:

• Your Friendbuy Widget ID: To find your Widget ID, navigate to Referral and Sharing > Widgets > [Name of the Widget] in your Friendbuy site. Click on the widget installation code option. Your widget ID is embedded with the JS code as shown in the screenshot below:

  

• Would you like the widget to appear when checkout out all or select plans?
  Finally, you can choose if you would like the referral widget to appear on every checkout for all of your plans or only for select ones.

Limitations 

• Reward will be applied on 1st purchase only.
• If you are not using Chargebee's hosted pages, you will have to manually install the referral widget and purchase order notification JS in your post-checkout thank you page so that Chargebee can communicate with Friendbuy on any referrals that your customers make.
• If you would like the widget to appear anywhere else on your website, you will have to manually install the widget in the page.
• If you would like to cancel credits that have been applied to a particular customer for a successful referral, you will have to manually delete the credits by navigating to the customer's details page in Chargebee.

FAQ 

• If a plan includes Trial period, will the Referrer/advocate receive the reward on Trial sign-up?

  An added advantage to using Friendbuy and Chargebee is that the integration makes space for trial periods with a validation check (after the trial is over) to ensure that free or trial subscriptions are not cancelled before transitioning to a paid account.

  To perform this validation, Friendbuy sets all eligible advocate rewards to pending for 30 days to accommodate trial periods. On day 31, Friendbuy sends a reward notification to Chargebee so that their system can check that the referred friend's account is active and their subscription is paid. The reward is applied to the advocate only after Chargebee confirms that the subscription is valid and active.

• The current flow explains how a new customer can sign up and share the Referral URL with their friends. How should I (as a merchant) share referral links with my existing customers?

  You can get your existing customers to sign up for the referral program by displaying your referral widget within your website. Find out more here.

• I'm using multiple Chargebee sites, how should I manage the referral campaign across accounts.

  If you have multiple sites in Chargebee, then you should sign up for multiple Friendbuy accounts. You can then perform the configuration process for each Chargebee site.

• What measures are put in place to detect fraudulent signups?
  Friendbuy has in-built fraud detection measures to track and prevent deceitful activities. Read more about Friendbuy's fraud prevention measures.

• I use my own ‘Thank you' page, and my referrals are not tracked in my Friendbuy account. What do I do?

  When you use your own ‘Thank You' page, you have to include the following tracking JS in your ‘Thank You' page to track the Friendbuy orders:

  <script> window['friendbuy'] = window['friendbuy'] || []; 
  window['friendbuy'].push(['site', '{{fbuy_site_id}}']); 
  window['friendbuy'].push(['track', 'customer', 
  { id: '{{customer.id}}', 
  chargebee_customer_id: '{{customer.id}}', 
  email: '{{customer.email}}', 
  first_name: '{{customer.first_name}}', 
  last_name: '{{customer.last_name}}' 
  } ]);
  window['friendbuy'].push(['track', 'order', 
  { id: '{{subscription.id}}', 
  amount: '{{invoice.purchase_amount}}', 
  email: '{{customer.email}}'
  } ]); 
  (function (f, r, n, d, b, y) { b = f.createElement(r), y = f.getElementsByTagName(r)[0];b.async = 1;b.src = n;y.parentNode.insertBefore(b, y);})(document, 'script', '//djnf6e5yyirys.cloudfront.net/js/friendbuy.min.js'); </script>

  The placeholders in the above JS need to be replaced with the actual values of the customer conversion details.

  fbuy_site_id: Friendbuy Site ID (that can be found in the Integration code section in Friendbuy)
  customer.id: Chargebee customer ID
  customer.email: Chargebee customer email
  subscription.id: Chargebee subscription ID
  customer.first_name: Customer's first name
  customer.last_name: Customer's last name
  invoice.purchase_amount: Invoice purchase amount
   
  The above information can be retrieved using the merge vars in the redirect URL. 

  However, if you're using hosted page APIs, the above information can be found by calling  Retrieve a hosted page  API.

• How do I track signups and conversions from Chargebee's Thank you page?

  In case you are using Chargebee's Thank you page you can easily track signups and conversions.

  To enable this you will have to add the data-cb-friendbuy-enabled tag in the Header Script or pass enableFriendbuyTracking as true while initializing Chargebee.init().
  Here's an example:

  <script src="https://js.chargebee.com/v2/chargebee.js" data-cb-friendbuy-enabled="true">