How do customer referral-program records (who referred whom, referral rewards owed) migrate as customer metadata during a platform switch?
Referral records do not migrate to Shopify, because Shopify has no referral object to migrate them into. Who referred whom lives in the referral app, and outstanding rewards are a liability on your books, not a Shopify balance. Export the ledger before you cancel the app, then decide whether to honor, pay out or convert.
There is no destination field, and that changes the question
Shopify has no native referral program. The referral graph, the attribution rules, the reward ledger and the payout history all live in whichever app runs the program. ReferralCandy, for instance, is live on the Shopify App Store at 4.9 stars across 1,487 reviews, "From $39/month," and it is one of a crowded category (per Shopify App Store, September 2026).
So the honest framing is not "how does this data migrate." It is "what happens to a liability when the system holding it changes."
Three separate things are tangled in the question
| Artifact | Where it lives | What a replatform does to it |
|---|---|---|
| The referral relationship (A referred B) | The referral app's own database | Unaffected if the app stays. Lost if the app changes and the new vendor offers no import |
| Rewards already earned and not yet redeemed | The app's ledger, and your accounts as an accrued liability | This is the one that matters. Someone is owed something |
| Reward codes already issued to customers | Shopify discount codes, usually | These are real Shopify objects and behave like any other discount code |
Only the third row is a Shopify data-migration question at all, and it is the easy one.
The nearest native primitive, and its B2B trap
Shopify's closest thing to a reward balance is store credit. It is "available for Shopify B2B and can be added to company locations," and it carries a documented split worth knowing: "if you add store credit to a customer profile, then this store credit can be used only in a D2C online store and can't be used in a B2B online store" (per Shopify Help Center, September 2026).
That matters for any merchant converting a referral balance into store credit. Credit issued to a person is D2C-only. Credit issued to a company location is B2B and shared among that location's assigned buyers. A wholesale merchant converting reward balances to the wrong object creates credit the customer cannot spend, and finds out from an angry phone call.
Matrixify's Shopify App Store listing includes Store Credits among the objects it imports and exports, which makes a bulk conversion practical rather than manual (per Shopify App Store, September 2026). Its own pricing page does not list store credits in the plan-limit table, so confirm the current object coverage before you plan a bulk load.
The decision, in order
- Is the referral app staying? If yes, this is a reconnection exercise and most of the below does not apply. Confirm the app supports your new store and re-authorize it.
- Export the full ledger before you cancel anything. Referrer, referee, reward earned, reward redeemed, outstanding balance, date. Every row, archived with a timestamp. Apps do not keep your data after cancellation, and support will not retrieve it for you.
- Get finance to value the outstanding balance. This is an accrued liability with a number on it. Decide who signs off.
- Choose a treatment for the outstanding balance. Honor it in the new program (requires import support, which most vendors do not offer), convert it to store credit, convert it to one-time discount codes, or pay it out and close the program. All four are defensible. Silently dropping it is not.
- Tell the customers. Whatever you choose, a short honest email beats a support queue.
- Preserve the referral graph as an export even if you cannot use it. It is your cheapest source of truth for who your advocates are, and a new program can seed from it manually.
When NOT to try to carry the program across
- When the outstanding balance is immaterial. Pay it out, close the ledger, and start the new program clean. This is faster and cheaper than any migration path.
- When you are changing referral vendors mid-replatform. Two changes, one weekend, one liability. Sequence them.
- When the program was not working. A replatform is a legitimate moment to stop running a program nobody redeems, and carrying its ledger forward just to be thorough is work with no return.
The Deploi point of view
Our own position, from building on Shopify. Separate from the facts above.
- Our take: Treat outstanding referral rewards as a liability with an owner in finance, not as a data-mapping row. The export-before-cancel step is the only irreversible one, and it takes an hour.
- What we’ve seen: The referral app is usually owned by a marketing manager and invisible to the migration plan until someone notices the store credit line in the accounts. It surfaces late because it is nobody's platform.
- Where we disagree: The reflex answer is to recreate referral balances as store credit. Sometimes right, often wrong, and specifically wrong for wholesale merchants, because customer-profile store credit does not work in a B2B store. Check the object before you bulk-convert.
- What this page adds: that store credit is the only native Shopify balance a referral reward can become, and that it is split into a D2C customer-profile flavor and a B2B company-location flavor that are not interchangeable, which makes the conversion a per-customer routing decision rather than a bulk load.
Reviewed by Martin Dejnicki, Director of SEO & AI Search. Facts verified 2026-09-14.
Where we worked this out
Our decision records