Affiliates

Sharing revenue with affiliates is a powerful way to drive collaboration and marketing efforts, and easy to set up on your Moonbase account. It all starts with setting up a contract between you and the affiliate: Affiliates > New contract, where you enter the affiliate's name and email, a title, the dates the contract is active, its commission structure, the commission basis and, optionally, a recoupable cost.

As your platform, Moonbase will onboard the affiliate automatically, collecting necessary business information and bank details to be able to pay out the affiliate commissions. Affiliates are paid out once a month, directly to their bank account, and gets access to a dashboard with insights into relevant sales and earnings. Unlike merchants, they have no payout fees, as that is covered by the affiliate fees levied on merchant sales directly. Similarly to merchants, there is a minimum payout threshold of 50€/$, to avoid bank fees eating up the payout.

A contract earns commission from its start date whether or not the affiliate has accepted the invitation yet. Until they do, the contract shows Invitation not yet accepted under their name, with Re-send invitation to email them a fresh link.

Commission Structure

Each contract on your account is evaluated for each sale made and may earn commission on the sale based on the commission structure defined in the contract. In the case you have multiple commission configurations on a single contract, the one with the highest commission will be used for each eligible line item in a sale. Separate contracts each pay on the same sale. If together they would come to more than that line's payout, they are all scaled down in proportion.

Each contract has a Commission basis. With Net of fees (the default), the share is taken from your net payout for the sale, after sales tax and fees, so it works as pure profit sharing. With Gross of fees, it is taken from the sale price before fees (sales tax is never included), and you absorb the fees on the affiliate's share.

We support 3 different commission structures:

1: Product-based commission

If you want to share revenue for all sales of a specific product, you can set up a product-based commission structure. You may also include bundle sales that contain the product, where Moonbase will calculate the commission based on the value of that product against all other products in the bundle.

This is most useful when collaborating with a partner on a specific product, where you want to share revenue for all sales of that product.

When splitting revenue for products within a bundle, Moonbase will split of a portion of the bundle revenue based on the value of that product versus any other product in the bundle.

As an example; when a bundle is sold for 100€ with the following two products:

Product A, base price: 40€

Product B, base price: 60€

In case an affiliate gets 25% of Product A, they would get 25% of 40% of the full bundle revenue, in this case 10€.

2: Coupon-based commission

For cases where you want to track affiliate impact by coupon codes, you can set up a coupon-based commission structure. Any sales that uses the coupon code will be eligible for the commission, but only the line items that the coupon applies to will be split with the affiliate.

Under Access control you can also let the affiliate see the coupon's codes in their dashboard (Read access), or create new codes of their own to share with their audience (Write access).

3: Marketing-based commission

Lastly, for more opaque tracking, you can set up a marketing-based commission structure. This looks at marketing parameters tracked on each sale to perform the commission split.

You are free to pick any parameters that fits the specific campaign or purpose. Every UTM field you fill in has to match exactly (it is case-sensitive), and a field left empty matches anything. For more information on how to set up marketing parameters, see the UTM tracking guide. If using the Moonbase Embedded Storefront, your website is automatically fully set up to track parameters on any link going to your website. If you run your own checkout on the Moonbase API, pass the visitor's UTM parameters when you prepare the order, so marketing-based commission still applies.

Recoupable costs

In case you have upfront cost related to a project with your partner, you can configure that directly on the contract, to withhold commission until the costs have been fully recouped.

Progress will be easily visible for both you as the merchant, but also the affiliate in their dashboard. You can opt to have a lower recoupment rate, in order to let the partner already earn some commission while costs are being recouped, and full commission once the costs have been fully recouped.