Refersion

Refersion emerged in 2015, tackling a niche market need — not for influencers, but for brands looking to manage and optimize their affiliate networks. The platform was a game-changer, providing a sophisticated alternative to the cumbersome spreadsheets that were once the norm for tracking transactions, handling payouts, and generating reports in affiliate marketing.

The service appealed to a broad audience: affiliates were typically individuals with high-traffic websites or significant social media followings who preferred earning commissions over upfront payments. As the digital marketing landscape evolved, the distinction between affiliate marketers and influencers started to blur, with both roles converging towards driving sales and creating content.

Recognizing this shift, Refersion expanded its capabilities beyond traditional affiliate marketing. The platform's integration with influencer marketing tools like Upfluence, #paid, and Cohley signified a strategic pivot, offering brands more comprehensive control over their marketing campaigns and partnerships.

One of Refersion's standout features is its ability to connect affiliates with brands that share similar target audiences, enhancing the relevance and effectiveness of marketing efforts. This is part of a broader trend in which platforms are increasingly offering matchmaking services between brands and content creators, reflecting a more sophisticated approach to digital marketing.

From its inception, Refersion was designed to give brands more autonomy over their affiliate programs. The platform stands out from its competitors by allowing brands to manage their own affiliate relationships freely, without being confined to a specific network or limited by restrictive commission structures. As the platform continues to adapt and evolve, it remains committed to providing brands with the tools and flexibility they need to navigate the complex and ever-changing landscape of affiliate and influencer marketing.

Refersion

Stepping into the influencer marketing landscape is a natural fit for this affiliate marketing app. Refersion helps brands build vast affiliate marketing networks, simplifying management, reporting, and training. Influencers as affiliate marketers is a logical progression.

Pros and Cons

Really easy way to manage affiliates at scale

Multiple ways to structure commissions

Content library connects directly to affiliate websites (edit locally, advertise globally)

Unique 1st Party Tracking to ensure affiliate sales don't get missed

Limited types of on-demand reporting

Not easy to organise influencers/affiliates according to performance

No on-platform payment processing

Best for: Medium to Large Size E-commerce brands

Ratings

Features

4.8

Ease of Use

4.5

Reporting

4.5

Overall Score:

4.6

Refersion Review:

Pricing

There are three different plans offered by Refersion.

Professional, $119/mo ($99/mo if paid annually) — You can have an unlimited number of affiliates and influencers on your roster, but you’re limited to tracking the first 50 affiliate sales each month. Additional features include setting commissions by SKU or product; sales tracking by referral links, coupon codes, emails, and SKUs; and custom integrations.

Business, $299/mo ($249/mo if paid annually) – Similar to Professional but a step above for those with growing programs that provide up to 200 affiliate sales each month.

Enterprise, Custom Pricing — All of the above, with unlimited affiliate sales tracking, plus professional services (onboarding, VIP affiliate matching), multi-shop support, custom development, and white labeling.

The Details

Refersion is, above all else, an affiliate and influencer marketing platform, which makes it an ideal fit for e-commerce brands. This is abundantly clear when you log in to set things up and one of the first things you have to do is integrate with your e-commerce solution. They have ready made apps that integrate with Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magent, Stripe, and Chargebee; any other e-commerce platform requires a custom integration with Refersion’s API. Unlike the apps that already exist, you won’t be ready to roll in minutes with this option, but you won’t be left in the dark, either.

Once you’ve set up the integration, it’s time to load your affiliates and influencers (from here on out, all will be simply referred to as influencers, mainly because this website isn’t called Affiliate Marketing Hub) into the platform. If you don’t yet have any influencers, and haven’t yet committed to any other influencer marketing platforms, it’s a good idea to start by looking at those that readily integrate with Refersion: Upfluence, #paid, and Cohley. You can also avail yourself of the Refersion Marketplace, which has two options: one is to publish a campaign (called "Offers" here) with specifics about what you need and what you're paying, and wait for people to apply to participate. The second is to indicate within the platform that you'd like to be matched to influencers, and Refersion will look for partners based on your mutual target audience. Instead of payments, though, you’re handing out trackable links and coupon codes. The platform also has you set up a landing page in parallel, which can exist right on your company website. 

These links and codes—along with email addresses and product SKUs—are very much the currency of the platform. Just as if you were paying in dollars, you need the flexibility to structure your offers in a way that makes the most sense for each campaign. This flexibility is one of Refersion’s highlights, as you’re not locked into a one-size-fits-all-approach. You can—and you will—grant flat rate commissions wherever you think appropriate. But you can also incentivise influencers by increasing those rates as sales volumes go up. You can set up very detailed performance-based commision structures almost as easily as you can say “5% across the board!”

Beyond just being able to set up simple referral rewards, offers can be structured such that a conversion needs to meet certain requirements to be considered payable. Refersion is then set up to make sure that the sales it tracks are conforming to these requirements. If they don’t, these sales still end up in the system, though it’s noted that they are Unqualified. It seems such a basic thing, but it was a really smart decision to include unqualified sales. At some point, someone will wonder why they haven’t been paid on a sale and this feature will have the answer to that question. Even better, Refersion’s made a portal for influencers, too, and they’ll be able to see these things on their own. 

One of the unique features of Refersion is its tracking ability. Typically, tracking systems use “cookies” that are placed on the customer’s browser in order to know when they’ve made a purchase. Refersion uses a unique 1st party tracking system, different from the typical cookie. Why is this important? Because recently Apple (and in 2024 Google will also) blocked 3rd party cookies in their apps to protect browser privacy. This will be a big problem for some merchants and affiliates who want to know more about their customers’ activities. Refersion gets around this problem to provide more accurate tracking which should appeal to both influencers and their brand partners.

But enough about payments that aren’t being made, let’s talk about the ones that are. There’s no on-platform mechanism for payment, which is a bummer. They say that one is being developed, though that doesn’t clarify why a product meant to simplify the management of payments doesn’t have its own payment system in place? The most convenient way is to pay via Paypal, or integrate with Payment Rails for ACH payments. Digital gift cards can also be issued from the platform. Or you can pay with whatever method you like, and then manually reconcile what’s owed on the Refersion platform.

Finally, there’s Refersion’s reporting function, which is all focused around sales. You can see the data from a number of different angles—there are a few pre-fab reporting filters offered, but you can also request customized reports from the Refersion team breaking the data down in different ways (though these, too, are ultimately just different ways of seeing the same data: sales). Some audience analysis could be really helpful when looking for patterns in why or why not certain campaigns perform better than others

This just about covers the Refersion workflow, and there’s one more feature I want to call out for how clever and useful it is. The platform keeps a kind of content library—these are the visual assets your influencers use, in the form of a banner ad, to act as affiliates on their websites or the link-in-bio space on social media. These assets are managed on the Refersion platform, and brands can make any changes they want to these like they want to update the ad with sale discounts for an upcoming holiday. By changing the ad on the platform, it automatically changes it downstream on an influencer website. All their commission structure stays intact, and there’s nothing they have to do to opt into this campaign: they’re already in it. There are more features than that designed to enhance the experience and drive more sales—this is one of the highlights. 

Conclusion

Refersion’s entry into the influencer marketing industry comes without any fanfare, and it’s just as well. They are best known as, and will continue to be, an affiliate marketing solution. The platform’s main function fills the needs of influencer marketers and doesn’t need to be retrofitted with added nonsense. Instead of working influencer platform features into their app, they’ve just created a new must-have feature for influencer marketing platforms. The ability to manage affiliate networks at scale like this is something that no other influencer platform has built out. But something tells me they will be doing that very soon, to better compete with Refersion.