User Roles

Purpose

Define every role in the system and what each one can see and do.

Roles

Merchant (Business Owner)

Sells a digital or physical product.

• Creates and manages campaigns
• Sets commission rate per campaign
• Reviews and approves/rejects creator applications
• Views campaign-level and creator-level performance
• Is billed by SellVia (via Swich) each billing cycle for the commission + platform fee owed on accepted sales — merchants keep their own revenue directly from their own Shopify checkout; there is no payout from SellVia to the merchant under the current model

Creator

Has an audience and promotes products for commission.

• Browses/discovers campaigns
• Applies to campaigns with audience info attached
• Gets a unique affiliate link on approval
• Views click/sale performance on their links
• Receives commission payouts

Admin (default scope assumed 2026-08-03 — please confirm)

Internal SellVia team role, full access, scoped to:

• Reviewing and acting on flagged/fraudulent activity
• Approving/rejecting high-commission or high-risk campaigns during vetting
• Managing the waitlist → beta invitation process
• Issuing manual refund/chargeback overrides
• Suspending or banning accounts on either side
• Viewing any user's data for support/moderation purposes (not for general browsing)

This is a single flat admin role for MVP — no tiered junior/senior moderator split. Add tiering later if the team grows enough to need it.

Can One Account Hold Both Roles? (decided default 2026-08-03 — please confirm)

Yes. A single account can be both a Merchant and a Creator simultaneously — e.g. someone selling a digital product who also promotes other merchants' products. Each role's data (MerchantProfile, CreatorProfile) is still modeled separately (see Domain Model), but nothing prevents one User from having both. This is simpler to build than enforcing mutual exclusivity and matches how real creator-economy users often behave.

Creator Eligibility Floor (decided default 2026-08-03 — please confirm)

No hard follower-count minimum. Eligibility is merit/fit-based: merchants see each applicant's audience size, niche, and engagement rate, and decide per-application — consistent with the live product's FAQ positioning and the "18k audience, 4.8% conversion" style creator card example. A very small audience isn't blocked; it's just visible information the merchant weighs.

Open Questions

• None blocking at MVP scope — the above are working defaults, not untested assumptions, and should be revisited if real usage shows a need (e.g. spam applications from zero-audience accounts might justify a minimal floor later).

Update (2026-08-23): Merchant Role Corrected — Billed, Not Paid Out

Merchant bullet "Receives payouts (their share of each sale)" was stale — under the current external-tracking model, SellVia does not pay merchants a payout at all. Merchants collect their own revenue directly from their own Shopify checkout and are instead billed by SellVia via Swich for the commission + platform fee owed each billing cycle. Corrected in place above; see Commission Engine, Payout Process.