Friendbuy

Overview

Friendbuy is a referral and loyalty program platform used by direct-to-consumer and subscription e-commerce brands. It powers refer-a-friend programs where existing customers receive rewards for recruiting new purchasers. Friendbuy's client-side scripts are responsible for surfacing referral widgets to current customers and tracking the attribution chain from share event through to referred purchase — a cross-session, cross-device tracking challenge that requires persistent cookies.

What This Script Does

Friendbuy scripts deploy referral widgets and manage conversion attribution across the customer lifecycle. Client-side behavior includes:

Referral widget rendering: Friendbuy's embed script injects referral program widgets onto the page — typically after purchase or on account pages — prompting customers to share a unique referral link via email, social media, or direct copy. Widget assets load from Friendbuy's CDN.

Unique share link generation: Friendbuy generates personalized referral URLs for each customer. These links contain encoded identifiers that allow Friendbuy to attribute future purchases to the referring customer.

Attribution cookie: When a visitor follows a referral link, Friendbuy's script sets a persistent attribution cookie on the visitor's browser. This cookie ties the visitor's subsequent browsing and purchase activity back to the referring customer. The cookie persists across sessions for the duration of the referral attribution window (typically 30-90 days depending on operator configuration).

Conversion tracking: When a referred visitor completes a purchase, Friendbuy's script fires a conversion event reporting the order value and customer identity to Friendbuy's servers for reward calculation and attribution reporting.

Customer identity: Friendbuy receives customer identifiers (email address, customer ID) from the operator's website to associate referral activity with specific accounts. This data is transmitted to Friendbuy's API.

Consent & Compliance

GDPR and ePrivacy Directive: Friendbuy's attribution cookie — which persists for 30-90 days and tracks browsing behavior across sessions to link it to a specific known individual — is the core consent challenge. This cookie constitutes personal data processing for marketing attribution that requires prior explicit consent under the ePrivacy Directive. Even though the referred visitor chose to follow a referral link, this does not constitute consent to persistent cross-session cookie tracking. The referral widget shown to existing customers also requires marketing consent for tracking purposes.

CCPA/CPRA: The combination of customer email address, purchase history, and referred visitor behavioral data constitutes personal information under CCPA. Cross-session attribution tracking of referred visitors may constitute "sharing" of personal information for targeted advertising purposes depending on how Friendbuy uses aggregated attribution data. A service provider agreement restricting secondary use is essential.

Consent category: marketing. Friendbuy's entire function is marketing attribution and referral program tracking.

Should You Block This Without Consent?

Yes.

Friendbuy scripts set persistent attribution cookies that track visitor behavior across sessions for marketing purposes. The attribution window of 30-90 days means the cookie persists well beyond what is necessary for a single session. These scripts must be blocked until the visitor provides explicit marketing consent. Referral links can still function as URL-based attribution without cookies as a privacy-preserving alternative, but the default Friendbuy implementation requires consent.