ReferralCandy vs UpViral: Which is a better fit?

Joe C.: Hi, my name is Joe. I'm a Sales Operations Manager in the healthcare industry, and I would give ReferralCandy five out of five stars. Our company didn't already have a referral marketing tool, so for us we really needed a way to capitalize on the current customers and generate referrals that way, just because referrals from present customers and friends are much more trustworthy. We decided to go with ReferralCandy because all of the other competitors didn't have as easy of a set up process, as well as it already had a built-in integration with our existing system. So in that way, we were easily able to scale up the referral program and connect with our customers for referrals immediately. Setting up ReferralCandy was actually pretty simple. All we had to do was add API keys into our existing checkout system. You can do it different ways, but that's what's easiest for us because we had some built-in integrations already. Then the other piece was obviously creating our referral program. So actually the meat of what the referral program is. So deciding what the referral reward would be and some of the settings and configurations that go around that. Lastly, some media like logos and branding, so that the referral emails themselves come off as branded and fit our brand. Otherwise, that was really all that was needed before referrals would be generated from our checkout system automatically. Definitely consider ReferralCandy, if you need a really easy and quick setup for your referral program for your company. However, that does come with some negatives. The first one and most clearing in my opinion, is the flexibility of the referral program itself isn't very strong. The way that... What that actually means to me is that there's no way to have tiered rewards in your referral program. So basically ReferralCandy will push out a reward to one of your customers, if they refer somebody using a tracking link. Now then when they get the reward, the reward is a singular reward and it isn't variable depending on how much money we spent or how many times they've successfully made a referral. There's only one single type of reward that you can have at a time. For a lot of people that's not flexible enough. So for our business, and when you're considering this, definitely make sure that your business model supports a very simple referral reward for your program. Now, the other thing that you should heavily consider before you purchase this or any other competitor really is how the payouts will be made. So ReferralCandy, for instance, you can make payouts through PayPal. That's built in. It doesn't come from your own PayPal. It comes from an enterprise-wide one that ReferralCandy handles. So you can do it that way through PayPal, but if you don't want to do it through PayPal, then there's the other two options which would be store credit, which I'm sure that there's an integration for that. Then also just a customer reward. The customer reward basically just means that you can't... It's not something handled through ReferralCandy's platform. You could build an API or some sort of integration into something else that would do it for you. But those are basically the three. Is PayPal and a store credit back to your store or whatever, or the customer reward. Those are the three. I think that's a huge implication for your business and something you should have fully vetted out before you actually consider it and go with any of these referral program platforms.