Commission Engine

Purpose

The exact math and timing of how a sale becomes a commission owed — plus the platform fee.

REVERSED 2026-08-07: No Live Split, Recorded as Owed

Previously described an instant Paddle split at time of sale. Superseded — SellVia no longer processes the payment (01. Money Flow, reversed 2026-08-07), so there is no live transaction to split. Commission and platform fee are now calculated and recorded as owed the moment a merchant-reported sale is accepted, then collected via periodic billing.

The Three-Way Math (unchanged arithmetic, changed mechanism)

Sale.amount (as reported by the merchant)
  → Creator commission = Sale.amount × locked commission rate
  → Platform fee = Sale.amount × 2%
  → Merchant owes SellVia = Creator commission + Platform fee
    (billed periodically, per 01. Money Flow)

Worked example, same reference numbers as before:

Reported sale: $68.00
Creator commission (20%, locked at approval — confirmed 2026-08-07): $13.60
Platform fee (2%): $1.36
Merchant owes SellVia $14.96 total at next billing cycle (not an instant deduction from a live transaction — merchant keeps the full $68.00 from their own checkout, then gets billed separately)

Commission Rate

Merchant-set, no bargaining, locked at creator approval (resolved 2026-08-07) — unchanged by this reversal.

Platform Fee

2% flat — unchanged. Collection mechanism changed (periodic billing, not live split), the rate itself did not.

Refund Clawback — Still Applies, Different Mechanism

Creator commission is never clawed back (confirmed 2026-08-07) — still true. A reported refund now adjusts what's billed to the merchant in a future cycle, rather than reversing a Paddle transfer that no longer exists.

What's Genuinely Harder Now

Accepting a merchant-reported sale as real is the new hard problem this doc depends on — under hosted checkout, "the sale happened" was a fact SellVia witnessed directly. Now it's a claim SellVia is trusting, with real fraud/under-reporting risk (04. Fraud Prevention needs new rules for this). The math above is unchanged; the confidence in the input to that math is lower than it was.

Open Questions

Verification/acceptance criteria for a merchant-reported sale before it's added to the billing ledger — not yet designed, a real gap this reversal creates
See 01. Money Flow for the broader open questions (billing cycle length, card-failure handling, creator payout sequencing)

Update (2026-08-07): Sale Report Acceptance Criteria RESOLVED — Auto-Accept With Baseline Integrity Checks

Founder-confirmed direction: light automated validation, not manual review of every sale. A reported sale is auto-accepted unless it fails a basic integrity check:

Duplicate external_order_id for the same merchant — rejected automatically (prevents double-counting from page reloads/re-fires)
Signed request check — each merchant's snippet includes a per-merchant secret in its report call, so a report can't come from anywhere except that merchant's own installed snippet (basic anti-spoofing, doesn't require a full webhook signature scheme)

Only pattern-level anomalies (not individual sales) route to Admin review — via 04. Fraud Prevention's existing rule-based checks (reported-sale volume vs. click volume, sudden reporting-pattern changes). Auto-accept is the default; manual review is the exception for suspicious patterns, not a per-sale gate.

This resolves 05. Payment Flow's open "sale-report acceptance criteria" question.

Update (2026-08-23): Pakistan/PKR Only, Offer Replaces Campaign, No Processor

See 02. Architecture Decision Log for full reasoning.

"Campaign.commission_rate" throughout this doc means "Offer.commission_rate" — no separate Campaign entity (01. Domain Model).
Currency is PKR, not USD. The worked example below replaces the earlier $68.00 example.
"Merchant owes SellVia" is no longer billed via Paddle — billed via Swich (confirmed 2026-08-23, replacing the interim bank-transfer working default). Same three-way math, different processor: Swich generates the billing-cycle invoice/payment-link, merchant pays through it, webhook confirms. See 05. Payment Flow, 05. Payout Process.

Worked example, in PKR:

Reported sale: ₨19,000
Creator commission (20%, locked at approval): ₨3,800
Platform fee (2%): ₨380
Merchant owes SellVia ₨4,180 total at next billing cycle (merchant keeps the full ₨19,000 from their own Shopify checkout, then is billed separately via Swich)