Collabs

A collab is a customer you have approved to earn commission. Use collabs when you want people to promote your store and get paid for the sales they bring in.

When you approve a collab, Litestore creates a short link on your own domain. The link's slug is the collab's code. When someone clicks it, Litestore counts the click and sets the attribution cookie that the cart reads. The orders that follow earn commission for that collab.

Litestore holds commission until it clears. You then pay it out through a ledger that only ever gains new rows, and you approve each payout request yourself.

The hold and the ledger are intentional. Money owed to a person shouldn't move the moment a card is charged. Once it has moved, nobody should be able to move it again without a trace.

Where to find it

Marketing → Collabs

Litestore keeps four kinds of record for the affiliate programme. It stores the collab, the tracked link created for them, each payout request they send, and a payout row for each request you approve.

Approval creates the link

When you approve a collab, Litestore does two things at once:

1. Creates their short link at /l/{code}. The link points at your store and adds affiliate UTM parameters.
2. Sends the approval email with their code in it.

You don't set a collab's status by hand. Litestore shows them as approved, rejected or pending based on when you made each decision.

Every code and every link slug is unique. No other collab can get the same code, and you can't create a link with that slug yourself.

What a click does

When someone clicks the collab's link, Litestore adds a click to the link and to the collab. It also sets the affiliate cookie for the attribution window.

The attribution window is 30 days by default. Orders placed within that time earn commission for the collab.

Litestore doesn't count clicks that look like they come from bots. Click counts feed into payout decisions, so a padded count would cost you money.

Setting the rate

Each collab has a default commission percentage.

You can also override the rate for a specific category. An override can be either a percentage or a fixed amount.

Litestore saves the commission on every order line at checkout. If you change a rate later, it only applies to new orders. What the collab already earned stays the same.

Refunds take commission back

Litestore reduces earned commission in proportion to how much of the order was refunded. If an order is partly refunded, the collab no longer earns commission on the refunded part. If it's fully refunded, they earn nothing from it.

From earned to paid

Commission isn't payable as soon as it's earned. It has to pass a hold period and a minimum amount first:

1. The order clears. It has to be older than the clearing hold, which is 30 days by default.
2. The balance reaches the minimum. The collab's cleared balance has to be above the minimum payout amount, which is 50 in your base currency by default.
3. The collab requests a payout for their cleared balance.
4. You approve or reject it. If you approve, Litestore writes a row to the payout ledger and lowers their cleared balance by that amount.

Litestore never edits or deletes rows in the payout ledger. A clawback goes in as a new negative row. This means a payment can't be reopened and paid a second time without anyone noticing.

Tier and stage are calculated

You don't set a collab's tier or lifecycle stage. Litestore works both out each time you open the page.

The tier depends on the collab's lifetime revenue:

basic
silver     at 1,000
gold       at 5,000
platinum   at 25,000

The lifecycle stage depends on your approval decision and how many days have passed since their last conversion. A collab is in one of these stages:

• Pending
• Rejected
• Onboarding
• Active
• Dormant
• At risk
• Churned, past 90 days

Rules to know before you launch

Collabs earn nothing from their own purchases. If a collab buys with their own code, Litestore still counts the conversion and the revenue, but it pays no commission.

A collab can create their own discount codes. Each code can discount up to a maximum, which is 15% by default. A collab can have a limited number of active codes at once, 10 by default.

Customer referrals work separately. When an ordinary customer refers a friend, Litestore tracks it through that customer's own referral code, not through a collab link. If an order has both a collab and a customer referral, the collab gets the commission and the customer doesn't get a referral reward. Each order earns only one credit.

Running the programme

1. Approve the collab. Litestore creates their tracked link and sends the approval email with their code.
2. Set the commission. Choose the default rate and add any category overrides.
3. Approve payout requests once the balance has cleared. Each approval writes a row to the payout ledger and lowers the collab's cleared balance by that amount.

Choosing what to change

Change the default rate when you want new terms from now on. It doesn't affect commission already saved on past orders, so you can't use it to correct old payouts.

Use a category override when one part of your catalogue needs a different rate. For example, you might want a fixed amount where a percentage wouldn't make sense.

Adjust the clearing hold and the minimum payout if you want fewer, larger payouts. You might also raise the hold if your customers often return items after 30 days.

To take money back, add a negative row to the ledger. There is no way to undo a payment, and that's on purpose.

Before you approve a payout, ask yourself one question:

Has this money made it past the refund window, or am I paying for orders that could still be returned?

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