What’s A Good Referral Rate in 2025? (Referral Benchmarks)

At ReferralCandy, we’ve been running referral programs for thousands of ecommerce stores for over half a decade now, and we’ve made our retailers almost $470,000,000 in referral sales.

A question we often get from ecommerce merchants is, “So, how well do referral programs perform, really?”

The answer is that referral programs can play a major role in revenue growth. One of our customers Branch Basics generated over $1.5 million from their referral program, and 10% of their overall revenue came from referrals. Brands like Farm Hounds have achieved even greater results, generating over $600,000 in referral sales with a referral rate of 22%.

It’s safe to say that referral programs work when executed right.

To get a better understanding of the effectiveness, let’s examine referral rates more in detail and look at the referral rates by industry.

(NOTE: If you would like to set up your own referral program, be sure to check out ReferralCandy. You can try it free for 14 days.)

What are referral rates?

Your referral rate is the volume of referred purchases as a % of your total purchases.

So a 1% referral rate means that 1 in 100 purchases at your store happens through your referral program.

An advocate can share their referral link through social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok, WhatsApp or through email. When the advocate’s friend clicks on the referral link and makes a purchase, the referral rate increases.

Referral program software, such as ReferralCandy, shows your referral rate inside the dashboard:

How did we calculate the referral program benchmarks?

To calculate the industry benchmark figures, we studied thousands of data points, tagged 

our users to one of the 11 largest industries and analyzed each industry.

From there, we learned that referral rates tend to reach a stable rate after around 6 months.

The resulting industry benchmarks represent the average referral rates that our users achieved after running their referral programs for 6 months.

Here’s what the full chart looks like:

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To put things into perspective, here are some examples of product categories in each industry:

• Apparel and fashion accessories: Clothing, accessories, shoes, etc.
• Beauty and grooming: Skincare, makeup, hair care, etc.
• Books and education: Book subscriptions, magazines, textbooks, etc.
• Toys, gifts, stationery, and crafts: Art supplies, etc.
• Food, beverage, and groceries: Pantry snacks, meal kits, etc.
• Gadgets and electronics: Electronic devices, electric scooters, etc.
• Health foods and supplements: Vitamins, etc.
• Home, garden, and pets: Pet food, gardening sheds, etc.
• Software and digital goods: SaaS products, etc.
• Sporting, outdoor goods, and accessories: Camping gear, etc.
• Vaporizers and tobacco products: Cigars, etc.

Referral program benchmarks from our analysis of different industries

Following are the results of our analysis of referral rates in different industries.

1. The global average referral rate is about 2.35%.

This means you can reasonably assume that any successful retailer that’s been using ReferralCandy for 6 months or more is getting about 1 in every 50 sales via referrals.

This should be a useful rule of thumb for an established business thinking about getting started on referral marketing.

If you already have product-market fit, happy customers, and a steady stream of customers from your existing acquisition channels, you can expect to increase your sales by about 2% minimum.

2. Software and digital goods generally have the highest referral rate of all industries, at 4.75%.

It’s a clear outlier compared to the other industries—software and digital goods have referral programs that perform a full percentage point better than all other industries!