Referwo, an Australian-based SaaS platform founded in 2022, automates influencer marketing campaigns for e-commerce brands by eliminating manual outreach and providing real-time sales tracking. The platform connects brands with a community of over 2,500 pre-vetted influencers across Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, focusing on niches such as parenting, kids, family, household goods, lifestyle, beauty, and skincare.

After spending more than a decade building and successfully exiting a multimillion-dollar e-commerce business, Ewen Ling created Referwo to address the inefficiencies she witnessed firsthand in influencer marketing: endless hours of manual outreach to potential influencers, inability to accurately track which influencers were driving actual sales, and wasted budgets on creators whose audiences didn’t align with their target customers.

“Brands were wasting hours manually reaching out to influencers, struggling to track ROI, and losing money on campaigns that weren’t measurable,” says Ewen. “I wanted to build a platform that not only connected brands with the right influencers, but also automated campaign management, tracked sales in real time, and made influencer marketing as measurable as running Facebook Ads.”

Referwo’s solution addresses these pain points through a dual-sided marketplace with carefully designed revenue models for each user group. “For brands, access is on a subscription basis, giving them full use of our features and tools,” Ewen explains. “For creators, joining is free, but we charge a platform fee on their affiliate earnings and paid collaborations. This structure keeps entry costs low while ensuring we only succeed when our users do.”

The platform specifically targets e-commerce brands because, as Ewen notes, “E-commerce brands live and die by conversions. Social commerce, where creators directly drive sales, turns influencer marketing into a measurable sales channel. It’s faster-paced, ROI-driven, and perfectly suited to automation.”

Automation and Measurement

Referwo’s process begins when brands with Shopify or WooCommerce stores connect their online shop to enable automatic tracking. They then create a campaign – whether it’s gifting, paid, or affiliate-based – and outline their brief and requirements.

“Instead of spending hours manually reaching out to influencers, brands simply publish their campaign on Referwo and relevant, pre-vetted influencers apply to them,” Ewen says. “This removes the need for endless DMs or email chains, allowing brands to focus on selecting the best-fit creators rather than chasing them.”

Once brands approve their chosen influencers, Referwo’s automation takes over. For Shopify and WooCommerce brands, the system automatically generates one-off discount codes for approved influencers to claim their free samples directly from the brand’s website.

Throughout the campaign, a built-in countdown timer reminds influencers of content submission deadlines, while a centralized communication system keeps all messaging, approvals, and feedback in one place. For affiliate campaigns, Referwo automatically generates unique discount codes for each influencer and tracks usage in real time, showing brands exactly which influencers are driving sales.

“On the ROI side, our real-time affiliate tracking shows every click, sale, and conversion generated by each influencer’s code,” Ewen says. “Brands can instantly identify top performers, scale those partnerships, and stop underperforming ones, maximizing their marketing budget.”

Finding the Right Creators

Referwo’s creator discovery system moves beyond subjective metrics, such as follower counts, to focus on audience alignment and proven performance. Brands can filter potential influencers based on specific niches, geographic locations, audience demographics, and past campaign results to find creators whose followers match their ideal customer profile.

This process is about to become even more enhanced with Referwo’s upcoming AI-powered discovery tool. 

As Ewen describes it, “Instead of manually applying filters, brands will be able to receive smart, creator recommendations based on their campaign brief, audience profile, and past performance data. The AI will analyze niche relevance, audience demographics, engagement quality, sales history, and content style to suggest creators who are most likely to deliver strong ROI, saving brands hours of research and ensuring a perfect audience fit every time.”

The Creator Perspective

In addition to Referwo’s services for brands, the platform is equally committed to creating value for creators. Any influencer with active social channels and an engaged audience can apply to join, although Referwo maintains quality through account verification and content review processes before creators can apply to campaigns.

For creators, Referwo provides multiple revenue streams through affiliate commissions, gifted products, and paid collaborations. Beyond compensation, the platform offers educational resources to help creators optimize their content and maximize campaign results. A centralized campaign management system streamlines communication, deadlines, approvals, and payments, allowing creators to focus on content creation rather than administrative tasks.

Referwo has also developed a recognition system that rewards creators for reaching specific milestones in areas like sales generation, communication quality, campaign completion, and content excellence.

The Euclove Case Study

To illustrate Referwo’s approach in action, Ewen shares a case study: a campaign with Euclove, an Australian brand offering cleaning products made with natural, botanical, essential oil-based formulations.

Operating in a crowded eco-cleaning market, Euclove’s team faced a common challenge: they needed to grow brand awareness and trust while communicating their unique product values. However, managing influencer collaborations, content distribution, and performance tracking manually was time-consuming and difficult to scale with their lean team.

Referwo enabled Euclove to scale their influencer marketing with minimal internal effort, delivering an end-to-end solution that simplified execution and maximized impact. The platform provided consistent applications from relevant, eco-conscious influencers, approval and campaign management from a central dashboard, and automated product gifting and logistics, saving both time and resources.

By simply providing free samples of their top-selling products, Euclove was able to generate over 400 pieces of quality content without a large upfront advertising spend.

The results: 139 influencers were activated, generating more than 42,000 engagements from targeted audiences, along with 50,000+ video views and 120,000+ impressions across social platforms. As Ewen shares, the campaign delivered an estimated 30x ROAS and 2,000% ROI.

Trends and Best Practices in Influencer Marketing

Through her work with thousands of brands and creators, Ewen has gained valuable insights into what’s working in e-commerce influencer marketing today. 

“Short-form videos with personal storytelling, paired with a clear call-to-action, are driving the highest engagement and conversions,” she observes. “Campaigns perform best when brands have a strong, unique selling proposition that resonates with both influencers and their audiences.”

Ewen also highlights a common misconception that undermines many brands’ influencer marketing efforts: “One of the biggest mistakes is treating influencer marketing as a one-off ad blast or expecting big results from working with only a handful of creators. The brands seeing real ROI treat it as a long-term investment by approving as many eligible influencers as possible. Providing free samples or small collaboration fees at scale builds a larger pool of active brand advocates, creates momentum, and drives a ripple effect that compounds over time.”

For brands developing their influencer strategy, Ewen recommends a balanced approach that combines different campaign types: “Use gifting and affiliate campaigns for performance-based scale while leveraging paid collaborations for higher-quality content and major campaign pushes. The sweet spot is combining all three strategically to build reach, generate genuine user-generated content, and maximize ROI.”

What’s Next for Referwo and Influencer Marketing?

Looking forward, Ewen sees several emerging patterns reshaping the influencer marketing field: influencers becoming long-term affiliate partners with recurring revenue streams, social platforms adding more native shopping features, and AI-powered audience matching becoming increasingly precise.

Referwo is preparing for these developments with its upcoming AI-powered influencer matching feature, which aims to reduce the time brands spend on creator discovery and improve ROI by connecting them with the most relevant influencers for their specific goals.

“AI will improve creator matching and campaign optimization, while advanced analytics will make it easier for brands to predict and scale ROI,” Ewen explains, outlining her vision for how technology will continue to change influencer marketing.

Ultimately, Referwo’s long-term aim is to be “the go-to performance-driven influencer marketing platform globally”. With growing demand in international markets, the company is preparing to expand further into the U.S. and the UK over the next two years.

For brands and creators working in the creator economy, Ewen offers one final piece of advice that encapsulates Referwo’s philosophy: “Data beats guesswork. Whether you’re a brand or a creator, track everything. The campaigns that win are the ones where both sides know what’s working and do more of it.”

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