Referral Links

A referral link is the simplest way to credit a partner, and for a Shopify app it is also the easiest thing to get wrong. The link a partner shares and the way your app records the install have to line up, or the credit disappears.

What a referral link actually carries

A referral link carries a partner's code from the moment a merchant clicks to the moment they install. The code is the whole point: it tells you which partner to credit. The real question is how that code survives the trip through the Shopify App Store and your app's install flow, because Shopify does not make that easy.

Why a plain App Store link fails

The obvious approach, handing a partner apps.shopify.com/your-app and tacking a code onto the URL, does not work. Shopify strips query parameters before your app's OAuth callback, so by the time the merchant installs, the code is gone. A raw App Store link with a code in it looks like it should work and quietly does not. This trips up almost every founder at least once.

The two links that do work

• •A tracked redirect link (for example getpartnerdock.com/r/CODE) that routes the merchant through a page you control. It drops a cookie and can send the merchant through your install URL carrying the code, so the code survives into your install flow.
• •A direct App Store link with an mref code (apps.shopify.com/your-app?mref=CODE), the Mantle-style format. The code is still stripped at install, but wrapping it in a redirect you control gives you the cookie, and analytics can sometimes recover the rest.

In both cases the reliable part is the hop through a page you own, not the App Store URL itself.

The signal that actually holds

The most reliable signal is a code your app forwards at install time. When a merchant clicks a tracked link, the partner code rides along to your install flow, your app reads it, and forwards it to your attribution system. That forwarded code is an exact match: you know precisely which partner drove the install, with no guessing and no window.

One code per partner, across every app

A partner who promotes more than one of your apps should keep one code across all of them, not a different code per app. Otherwise a link they already shared can break when it collides with another app's code. Let the link carry which app it is for, and keep the code the partner's own.