What Counts as a Qualifying Purchase
Exactly which orders trigger affiliate rewards, which ones do not, and why a referral can stay Pending even when the new customer is clearly active.
A referral only earns a reward once the new customer makes a qualifying purchase. In short, a qualifying purchase is a real order paid with live money (by card, or by any other payment method you have set up). An order settled entirely from someone's existing wallet balance does not count, and topping up a wallet does not count either.
If you remember nothing else: the spend has to flow through an actual order paid with real money. Paying with site credit alone, or adding funds to a wallet, will not trigger a reward.
What does count
A normal order paid by card (or any live payment method you offer). This is the everyday case and qualifies as you would expect.
A part-payment order, where the customer covers part of the basket with their wallet balance and pays the rest by card. This still counts as a real purchase, so it qualifies. The exclusion below is only about orders paid 100% from existing credit, not about any use of the wallet.
What does not count
An order paid entirely with site credit. If the new customer pays for their whole order out of their wallet balance (credit they were given or already held), no reward is triggered. The referral stays Pending.
A wallet top-up. When a customer adds funds to their own wallet, that top-up never triggers a referral reward, even though money has changed hands and it shows up in their transaction history. The reward fires on what they later spend that balance on, as long as that spend is itself a qualifying purchase.
How this works with your minimum spend threshold
The same rule applies on top of the Minimum Spend Threshold you set, and it behaves slightly differently depending on your Threshold Type.
Single Order. The threshold is checked against the one triggering order, and that order must itself be a qualifying (card or part-card) purchase. A credit-only order or a top-up is ignored entirely, so it can never be the order that meets the threshold.
Cumulative Spend. The running total the system adds up also excludes credit-only orders and wallet top-ups. Every other completed order counts towards the figure at its full basket value, so a part-payment order is included in full (including the part covered by wallet credit). Only orders paid entirely from credit, and top-ups, are left out. The order that finally pushes the total over your threshold is the one that triggers the reward.
Why a referral can stay "Pending" forever
As noted on Managing Referrals, a referral stays Pending until a qualifying purchase is made, and it never automatically expires. If a friend has clearly been active but the referral is still Pending, it is almost always one of these reasons:
They have only ever paid with site credit they already held.
They have only topped up their wallet and spent from that balance.
With Cumulative Spend, their qualifying orders (everything except credit-only orders and top-ups) have not yet added up to your threshold, even though their total wallet activity looks higher.
Practical advice for operators
When you set your reward amounts and minimum spend, picture a friend who pays with credit. They will not convert the referral until they make a real, live payment.
If you give new customers generous welcome credit, expect some referrals to sit in Pending for a while until those customers spend real money.
Remember that a wallet top-up is not the same as a qualifying purchase. The spend has to flow through an actual order paid with live payment.
None of this changes anything else about how rewards work. Once an order qualifies, the hold period, manual approval, and reward amounts all behave exactly as described in Setting Up the Scheme. This page only clarifies the gate that decides whether an order counts in the first place, so you can set sensible reward amounts and explain to customers with confidence why a reward has not yet appeared.
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