Referral & Sharing System

After a customer signs up on a coming soon product, the plugin doesn’t just say “thanks” — it turns that customer into a promoter. The signup form is replaced with share buttons, and anyone who signs up through a shared link is recorded as a referral. This gives you a built-in, zero-cost way to grow a waitlist virally and to reward your most enthusiastic customers.

This article explains how it works, what gets recorded, and the current limitations.

The customer’s experience

1. A customer enters their email and clicks LET ME IN.
2. The form disappears and is replaced with a short message plus share buttons: Facebook, X (Twitter), and a Copy Link button.
3. The message encourages them to “share with others to increase your priority.”
4. If that customer comes back to the page later, they skip straight to the share buttons — the plugin remembers they’ve already signed up.

How a referral is tracked

The whole loop is handled in the visitor’s browser using cookies and a URL parameter. Here’s the journey end to end:

1. Alice signs up. MailerLite returns her subscriber ID. The plugin stores it in a cookie (sscs_mailerlite_user_id) that lasts one year, and shows Alice her share buttons.
2. Alice shares. Her share links point at the product page with an extra parameter identifying her, e.g. https://yourstore.com/product/widget/?shared_by=123456 (where 123456 is Alice’s MailerLite ID).
3. Bob clicks Alice’s link. Arriving with ?shared_by=123456, Bob’s browser stores that ID in a cookie (sscs_shared_by_id).
4. Bob signs up. His signup carries Alice’s ID along with it, and the plugin records it in the referrer_id column of Bob’s row in wp_sscs_signups.

The result: Bob’s signup record knows it came from Alice. Repeat across many customers and you can see exactly who is driving your waitlist growth.

Seeing your referrals

Referrals are stored in the referrer_id column of the wp_sscs_signups table. There’s no admin screen yet, so you read them with a database query. The Viewing & Exporting Your Signups article has ready-made queries, including a “top referrers” leaderboard.

About “priority”

The post-signup message tells customers that sharing increases their priority. The plugin records the referral data that makes a priority/reward scheme possible, but it does not itself calculate or enforce any ranking. How you use the data is up to you — for example, you might:

• Email your top referrers an early-access link or a discount before launch.
• Sort your launch list by referral count and notify the biggest sharers first.

The raw material (who referred whom, and how many) is all in the referrer_id column.

Limitations and gotchas

• Super Speedy Emails (SSE) products don’t get share buttons. The referral and share-button flow is part of the built-in MailerLite form. When a product uses the SSE provider, SSE renders its own form and handles its own post-signup experience, so the share buttons and ?shared_by= tracking don’t apply there.
• The referrer must have signed up first. Share links only carry a shared_by ID if the sharer’s sscs_mailerlite_user_id cookie is present (i.e. they signed up in that browser). If the cookie is missing, the share buttons fall back to a plain page URL with no referral tracking.
• Cookies are per-browser. A referral is only attributed if the referred visitor signs up in the same browser where they clicked the link, before the cookie is cleared. Clearing cookies, switching devices, or using private/ incognito windows will break the chain. This is normal for cookie-based referral systems.
• MailerLite must be configured for the subscriber ID to exist. If no API key is set, signups are still saved locally but there’s no MailerLite ID to use as a referral identity, so sharing falls back to the plain URL.

Testing the referral flow

Because it relies on cookies, the cleanest way to test is with two separate browser profiles or an incognito window:

1. Sign up as “Alice” in your normal browser. Confirm the share buttons appear.
2. Copy one of Alice’s share links (it should contain ?shared_by=).
3. Open that link in a private/incognito window and sign up as “Bob” with a different email.
4. Check the wp_sscs_signups table — Bob’s row should have Alice’s MailerLite ID in its referrer_id column.

To reset and test again, clear the sscs_mailerlite_user_id and sscs_shared_by_id cookies, or just use a fresh incognito window.

Related

• Viewing & Exporting Your Signups — queries to read referrer_id and rank referrers.
• Privacy & Data Handling — the cookies this feature sets and what they store.
• Troubleshooting — “Referral tracking is not working”.