Amazon Pushes Mobile Referral Program

There is winning, and then there is dominating the field. Apparently, Amazon feels a little more of the latter is necessary for its mobile efforts. Despite already having the number one shopping app in app stores, Amazon is hoping to bring more customers into the mobile shopping fold by pushing a referral program.

For every referred mobile customer who installs the app and makes a buy, Amazon will throw the referrer back $10 and the newly referred $5. Both come in the form of coupons.

The program is not actually new. It launched sometime earlier this year, but it was largely invisible to users, unless they were particularly diligent about checking their settings. Now boldly advertised, TechCrunch reports that the push even includes fullscreen takeover ads at times.

“Amazon has an award-winning shopping app that our customers love. We wanted to help give them a way to share it with an added incentive,” a company rep explains. “So, we introduced a program that provides a $5 incentive for customers to refer a friend or family member to shop with the app.”

The referral program is similar to what is on offer for Amazon Student — a lower cost version of Prime for college kids — and for Amazon Prime itself — those who refer get a $5 credit (and on Student, new referrals also get a credit). But those programs both rely on Facebook posting or sending emails; the mobile app referral program, on the other hand, taps right into a user’s phone contact list. Users can either email or text the referral link.