Collabs

A collab is a customer approved to earn commission.

Approving one creates a short link on your own domain whose slug is their code. Clicking it counts a click and sets the attribution cookie the cart reads, and orders that follow accrue commission.

Commission is held until it clears, then paid out through an append-only ledger you approve request by request.

The holding period and the ledger are deliberate. Money owed to a person should not move the moment a card is charged, and once it has moved there should be no way to move it again quietly.

Where it lives

Marketing → Collabs

Four records sit behind the affiliate programme: the collab, the tracked link created for them, the payout requests they raise, and the payout rows written when you approve one.

Approval creates the link

Approving a collab does two things at once:

1. Creates their short link at /l/{code}, pointing at your store and tagged with affiliate UTM parameters.
2. Sends the approval email carrying their code.

Whether a collab reads as approved, rejected or pending is taken from the decision timestamps rather than from a status you set by hand.

Their code and the link slug are both unique, so no second collab and no link you create yourself can ever take the same one.

What a click does

A click on the collab's link:

• Counts against the link
• Counts against the collab
• Sets the affiliate cookie for the attribution window

The attribution window is 30 days by default. Orders placed inside it accrue commission for that collab.

Clicks that look like bots are not counted. An inflated click count would feed straight into payout signals, so the count is defended rather than taken at face value.

Setting the rate

Each collab has a default commission percentage.

On top of that you can set per-category overrides, each of which is either a percentage or a fixed amount.

The commission is frozen on every order line at checkout. Changing a rate later never rewrites what was already earned — it applies from that point on.

Refunds claw commission back

Earned commission is prorated by the unrefunded share of each order.

• A partly refunded order no longer owes commission on the refunded part
• A fully refunded order drops out entirely

From earned to paid

Commission does not become payable the moment it is earned. It passes through a hold and a threshold first:

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

The ledger is append-only. Clawbacks are entered as negative rows rather than by editing history, so what has been paid can never be quietly re-opened and paid twice.

Tier and stage are calculated

Neither a collab's tier nor their lifecycle stage is a field you set. Both are worked out when you read the page.

Tier comes from lifetime revenue:

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

Lifecycle stage comes from the approval decision and the days since their last conversion:

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

Rules worth knowing before you launch

Self-dealing earns nothing. A collab buying with their own code still counts as a conversion and as revenue, but earns no commission.

A collab can create their own discount codes, up to a maximum discount — 15% by default — and can hold a limited number of active codes at once, 10 by default.

Customer referrals are a separate path. Refer-a-friend for ordinary customers is tracked through the customer's own referral code, not through this link. When an order carries both, the collab commission takes precedence and the customer referral reward is not granted — one credit per order.

Running the programme

1. Approve the collab. That creates their tracked link and sends the approval email carrying their code.
2. Set the default commission rate and any per-category overrides.
3. Approve payout requests once the balance has cleared. Each approval writes a row to the payout ledger, and the collab's cleared balance drops by that amount.

Deciding what to change

Change the default rate when you want different terms going forward. It will not touch commission already frozen onto past orders, so there is no way to use it to correct history.

Use a category override when one part of the catalogue can carry a different rate than the rest — a fixed amount where a percentage would be wrong.

Adjust the clearing hold and the minimum payout when you want fewer, larger payouts, or when your refund pattern means 30 days is not long enough.

Enter a clawback as a negative ledger row rather than looking for a way to undo a payment. There isn't one, and that is the point.

The question to ask before approving a payout is:

Has this money survived the refund window, or am I paying out on orders that can still come back?

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