Automatically generate a coupon or apply credit to a customers account

Question

We are looking to draw in more customers to our store by offering incentive to existing customers to email friends about our website.

What we want to have is a page with a form on it where they can enter their email address and say 5 emails of their friends and then press a submit button. After that I would like to check that their email is registered on the site and either generate a £5 voucher to be sent to them, or just apply a £5 credit to their account.

Can either of those two options be setup in Magento by default or would an extension need to be used to achieve this?

Answer 1

You would need an extension. This functionality typically goes by the name of "refer a friend". Quite a few of these exist for Magento, depending on what you need you might be able to use an existing one or adapt it.