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Business Rules

Business Logic/Business Rules.md
backendUpdated Aug 23, 2026

Business Rules

Purpose

The rules that govern valid state transitions and actions — the things that must always be true regardless of which screen a user is on.

Decided (2026-08-03): commission rate is set entirely by the business owner, with no platform-enforced range and no bargaining at launch. See Commission Engine for the full rationale.

Campaign Rules

  • Merchant sets the commission % freely at campaign creation — no platform min/max.
  • No negotiation/bargaining at launch. Commission is take-it-or-leave-it: merchant sets it, creator applies at that rate or doesn't apply. A single "request a different rate" counter-offer feature is a candidate for v2, not MVP — open haggling reintroduces the exact friction ("no contracts," per the live product positioning) the product is designed to remove.
  • $0 owed by merchant until a sale is verified — no upfront fee, no ad spend required.
  • A campaign cannot be edited (commission rate changed) while it has active, approved creators without a defined re-consent flow (not yet specified — see Edge Cases).

Application Rules

  • Creators apply to campaigns; merchants do not solicit creators directly ("creators apply — not the other way around"). Cold-outreach features should not be built.
  • Merchant sees the creator's audience/niche/conversion data attached to the application before approving.
  • Only one AffiliateLink is generated per approved Application (one creator, one campaign, one link).

Attribution Rules

  • Every click, cart-add, and purchase is attributed to the specific AffiliateLink that generated it — no shared/generic links per campaign.
  • Attribution window: 30 days (decided 2026-08-03). Matches the long-standing affiliate-industry default (Amazon Associates, ShareASale) and protects creators when a follower clicks today but buys later, which is common above impulse-buy price points. Can be shortened per-campaign in a later version if data shows shorter windows work better for cheap/impulse items.
  • Attribution data is visible identically to both merchant and creator.

Sale & Commission Rules

  • Commission = Sale.amount × Campaign.commission_rate at the time of the sale (locked at time of sale, not retroactively affected by later rate changes).
  • "Verified" = payment completed successfully (decided 2026-08-03) — i.e. the customer's payment has cleared, not gated behind a return-window expiry. See Money Flow for the refund/chargeback exposure this creates and the proposed clawback rule.

Payout Rules

  • Payout threshold: $50 (amount TBD in PKR) (decided 2026-08-03, threshold mechanism; PKR figure not yet re-specified). Commission is not credited instantly — per Commission Engine's reversed model, commission is calculated and recorded as owed when a merchant-reported sale is accepted, then only becomes available in the creator's balance once the merchant's billing cycle is billed and paid via Swich; the actual payout is triggered once the balance crosses the threshold — see Money Flow and Commission Engine for the bill-first-then-pay timing.
  • Both parties see the same receipt for every payout (amount, commission split, platform fee, timestamps) — this symmetry is a trust mechanism and should not be broken by showing merchants and creators different numbers.

Multi-Currency (updated 2026-08-03: PKR removed)

  • Supported currencies: USD, EUR, GBP.
  • Merchant lists a product in their preferred currency.
  • All three are well-supported by standard processors (Paddle handles payouts in USD/EUR/GBP cleanly) — no special payout-rail workaround needed for MVP.
  • PKR was considered and dropped for now — most processors, including Paddle, don't support direct PKR payouts to connected accounts, which would have required a separate local payout partner. Can be revisited post-MVP if there's real demand from Pakistani creators/merchants.

Open Questions

  • Re-consent flow (if any) when a merchant changes a campaign's commission rate mid-flight with active creators
  • Chargeback/refund clawback window and mechanism (see Money Flow)
  • Whether "request a different rate" (single counter-offer) ships in v2

Update (2026-08-07): Commission Lock Timing — RESOLVED

Resolved: locked at approval, not at time of sale. A creator's commission rate is fixed the moment they're approved for a campaign and never changes afterward, even if the merchant edits the campaign's commission rate later. This corrects the "at time of sale" language elsewhere on this page — that was the wrong side of a contradiction with State Machines and Table Specifications, both of which already correctly said "at approval" (applications.locked_commission_rate, snapshotted at approval time). All three docs now agree.

Update (2026-08-07): Self-Dealing Block Added

A dual-role account (Merchant + Creator) cannot apply to their own campaign — blocked outright, confirmed 2026-08-07. Added as a hard Application Rule: the CreatorProfile submitting an application can never share a user_id with the Campaign's owning MerchantProfile. Full detail in 08. User Edge Cases.

Update (2026-08-23): MAJOR REVISION — Pakistan/PKR Only, Offer Replaces Campaign

See 02. Architecture Decision Log for full reasoning. This section corrects the rules above.

Multi-Currency section is superseded: SellVia is Pakistan-only for MVP, PKR is the only supported currency. USD/EUR/GBP support (and the reasoning about Paddle handling them) no longer applies to MVP — it's a post-MVP item now, see Full Product Vision (Post-MVP). The "PKR dropped because Paddle can't pay it out" reasoning is moot: Paddle itself is removed (no processor for MVP; working default is direct bank transfer — see MVP Scope, Payment Flow).

"Campaign" throughout this document (and Campaign Rules above) means "Offer": there is no separate Campaign entity. "Offer is offer, it is not turning into any campaign at all" — an Offer carries the commission rate and lifecycle status directly. Re-read every rule above with s/Campaign/Offer/ — the rules themselves (commission set freely, no bargaining, $0 owed until verified, one AffiliateLink per approved Application, 30-day attribution window, locked-at-approval commission, $50 payout threshold, no clawback) are all unchanged in substance. Only the entity name changes. Full entity detail in 01. Domain Model (updated same date).

Update (2026-08-23): Payout Rules Section Corrected — No Instant Paddle Split

Payout Rules above still described commission crediting "instantly per sale (via Paddle split)" — stale, corrected. Per Commission Engine's reversed model (also 2026-08-07/2026-08-23), commission is calculated and recorded as owed when a merchant-reported sale is accepted, and only becomes available in the creator's balance once the corresponding merchant billing cycle is billed and paid via Swich — not instantly, and not via Paddle (Paddle is removed for MVP). The $50 threshold mechanism itself is unchanged; the PKR-equivalent figure is still TBD, same open item as elsewhere in this doc set.