Does Simple Affiliate tag referred customers and orders in Shopify?

Yes, on every plan. Simple Affiliate adds tags in Shopify Admin, so you can find affiliates, referred customers, and their orders without turning on permanent customer connection. All the tags are on until you turn them off in Flows. A pending referral gets no tags until it is confirmed.

Customer tags

The first time a referral of a customer is confirmed, the customer gets three tags: Referred by affiliate, Referred by followed by the affiliate's Shopify customer ID, and Referred by followed by the affiliate's email address. A customer who already has a Referred by tag keeps the tags of the first affiliate. Customer tags stay when a referral is reversed.

The Shopify customer of each active affiliate gets an Affiliate tag, an Affiliate Group: tag with the name of the group, and an Affiliate code: tag with the discount code when the group gives a discount. Simple Affiliate removes these tags when the affiliate is no longer active.

Order tags

Each order with a confirmed referral gets Referred by tags with the affiliate's Shopify customer ID and email address, and a Simple Affiliate method: tag that says how the order was credited, such as Link, Code, Manual, Customer, or Product. An order credited through a link, or through a code of the same affiliate after their link, also gets a Simple Affiliate link ID: tag. When a referral is reversed, Simple Affiliate removes these order tags.

Turning tags off

The Flows page has two default flows, Order tags and Customer tags, that you can't delete. To stop a tag:

1. Open Flows.
2. Click Order tags or Customer tags.
3. Turn off the switch of the tag.
4. Click Save.

To stop all the tags of a flow, click Disable flow on the flow page. Simple Affiliate then adds no new tag of that kind. Tags that orders and customers already have stay, except a tag that is no longer correct, such as the order tags of a reversed referral, which Simple Affiliate still removes. Turning tags off doesn't change referrals or commissions. The View referrals (on Shopify) and View referred customers actions of Affiliates filter by the Referred by tag with the affiliate's customer ID, so each action shows only while that tag of its flow is on. When you turn the tag on again, the action comes back. It finds only the orders and customers that have the tag, so it misses most records of the time that the tag was off: Simple Affiliate doesn't go back and tag them, and adds the tag to an old order only when it writes that order's tags again, for example after a partial refund.

Finding reorders

The tags don't earn the affiliate anything. To see what a referred customer bought later:

1. Open Customers in Shopify Admin.
2. Filter by the tag, for example Referred by affiliate.
3. Open the customer and look at their orders.

Commission on later orders needs permanent customer connection, a Pro and Premium feature that you can leave off. That feature adds a separate Connected to tag with the affiliate's email address, which you can also turn off in the Customer tags flow.