ShareCrew — Creator Profit-Share for WooCommerce

Description

ShareCrew gives your WooCommerce creators a link and, if you want, a
discount code, credits the orders they send, and shares a percentage of each
order’s profit — not its revenue — with them. Maturation, refunds,
statements and payout files are handled for you.

Requires WooCommerce 8.5 or newer, active (order attribution). WooCommerce
10.3 or newer is recommended so the Costs card can read WooCommerce’s own
Cost of Goods Sold field directly; on an older WooCommerce, ShareCrew still
works from a product cost meta key, a category margin, or a global margin
you set.

How a creator gets credited

ShareCrew reads several signals and picks the strongest one, in this order:

1. A typed code — a real WooCommerce coupon the creator owns. Most
   short-form video traffic never clicks anything; a viewer types the code
   they saw, so the code is the primary signal, not a fallback.
2. The referral link (/go/{handle}), which sets a first-party cookie
   on a dedicated, never-cached redirect, or a ?cr= URL parameter picked
   up by a small client-side script when the landing page itself was served
   from cache.
3. WooCommerce’s own order-attribution data, when neither of the above is
   present.
4. A repeat-customer lock: for a number of days you choose, a customer’s
   later orders are credited to the creator who first brought them, even
   with no code or cookie on the later order.
5. A manual assignment you make yourself on the order.

Exactly one creator is credited per order, and every commission row records
which of these signals won.

Codes are optional. With links only switched on, ShareCrew creates no
coupons, no audience discount exists, and every screen, email and the public
program summary speak only of the link; orders are credited by the link,
WooCommerce’s attribution data and the repeat-customer lock. Switching codes
off expires the creators’ coupons without deleting them, and switching back
restores them.

Who pays for a code’s discount

A setting decides who carries the discount a creator’s code gives:

• The store (the default): the code gives the program’s discount, and the
  share is worked out on the profit after it, so the store and the creator
  each carry part of it.
• The creator: each creator picks their own code’s discount, a whole
  percent inside a range you set, and pays for it out of their share. The
  share is worked out as if the code had not been used, then the discount
  comes off it — never below zero, and never carried to another order. Your
  margin on the order is the same with or without the code. Orders credited
  by link carry no code and keep the full share.

Changing who pays, or the range, re-applies the rules to every live creator
coupon at once.

What “profit” means, and what your store must provide

A commission can be based on profit, on plain revenue, or on a
fixed amount per order. The basis applies to the whole program; the rate
comes from the creator’s tier and can be overridden per creator, product or
category.

In profit mode, ShareCrew builds a breakdown for the order: the price paid,
minus your product cost, an estimated share of shipping and packaging, an
estimated payment-gateway fee, and the cost of any gift item — and shares
your chosen percentage of what is left. It reads your product cost from
WooCommerce’s own Cost of Goods Sold field where that WooCommerce feature is
active, or from a cost custom field, a per-category margin, or a global
margin you set — in that order, and it always shows which one supplied a
given line.

An unknown cost is never treated as zero. A line whose cost ShareCrew
cannot find puts that commission on hold, naming the product, unless you
have explicitly opted to assume a stated default margin instead. A
commission is also held (and capped) if the computed amount would exceed a
safety ceiling you set as a percentage of the order’s revenue — this is a
guard against a data error, not a normal outcome. The Settings screen states
plainly how many of your products have a cost ShareCrew can read, because a
profit-share program computed on missing cost data quietly overpays on
exactly the orders that lost you money.

Payouts: files and store credit — it does not move money

ShareCrew does not connect to PayPal, Stripe, your bank, or any payment
processor, and it never will move money on your behalf in this version.
What it does:

• Builds a payout run from every creator’s approved, matured commissions.
• Exports a PayPal CSV file (ready to upload to PayPal’s own mass-payout
  tool) and a bank-transfer CSV file (holder, IBAN, BIC, amount), each
  with a numbered statement per creator.
• Issues WooCommerce store credit directly, as a coupon restricted to
  the creator’s own account, with an optional bonus percentage for choosing
  credit over cash.
• Records what was paid on a numbered, sequential statement per creator,
  carrying your self-billing text for your bookkeeper.

You upload the CSV file to PayPal or your bank yourself, and mark the run
paid once you have; a payout run and marking it paid are always two separate
actions, both recorded with who did it.

The cache requirement, stated plainly

The referral cookie is set only on the /go/ redirect, and that response
must never be served from cache. A full-page cache or CDN that caches
/go/ — or strips its Set-Cookie header — will serve the first visitor’s
cookie to everyone after them, silently. ShareCrew’s Settings screen names
the exact path to exclude for Cloudflare, LiteSpeed and nginx, and a daily
health check fetches your own /go/_probe URL to confirm the exclusion is
still in place, naming the caching layer and the fix when it is not. Codes
are unaffected by this: a typed code is credited whether or not the cookie
ever gets set.

Privacy and consent

• The click log stores a salted, one-way hash of the visitor’s IP and
  browser string, the referring host, the landing path, a coarse country
  and device class — never the IP or user-agent string itself — and it is
  pruned after the retention period you set.
• Tracking mode is a setting you choose during setup, honestly:
  “Always” sets the referral cookie unconditionally; “Only with consent”
  waits for a marketing-category consent signal before setting it; “Code
  only” never sets a cookie at all and relies on typed codes and manual
  attribution. ShareCrew does not decide your legal posture for you.
• “Only with consent” is the default. It reads the WP Consent API
  (wp_has_consent( 'marketing' )), which consent plugins such as Complianz
  or CookieYes provide. Without such a plugin, a link click never sets the
  cookie: codes and the repeat-customer lock credit orders as usual, and a
  link is credited only when WooCommerce’s own order attribution recorded
  the visit.
• A creator’s own data can be exported and erased through WordPress’s
  built-in Tools → Export/Erase Personal Data screens. Erasure replaces the
  creator’s name, handle, platforms, application text, tax profile and
  payout details with a placeholder; commission and payout amounts are kept
  as your accounting record, the same way WooCommerce keeps order records
  after a customer erasure.
• ShareCrew’s own database holds no customer name, email or address — a
  creator’s own account pages never show a customer’s identity, only an
  order number and date.
• ShareCrew has no backend of its own: it calls no ShareCrew-hosted or
  third-party service, and it makes no requests to any outside service.
  Everything it computes runs on your site, against your own WooCommerce
  data. The one HTTP request it makes at all is a daily fetch of your own
  site’s own /go/_probe URL — a same-origin check of your own cache
  layer, described above, never a call to WP Shelf or anyone else. Creator
  avatars in the portal and on the opt-in leaderboard come from WordPress’s
  own avatar setting, which by default the visitor’s browser loads from
  Gravatar.

What it does not do

ShareCrew is not an affiliate network, an influencer CRM, a content-approval
tool, a customer refer-a-friend scheme, or a payment processor. It does not
move money to a creator directly; it prepares the files and the store-credit
coupon, and a person carries out the transfer. It does not decide your
tracking-consent posture, generate a legal terms page for you (it offers a
starting-point terms skeleton, clearly labelled as not legal advice), or
handle any tax filing or withholding. It flags a code whose recent use looks
unusual — an unexplained spike in uses, or referrals from a known coupon-site
domain — for you to review; a flag is information for a human, never an
automatic block or void.

When a creator leaves

When a creator leaves the program — archived by you, leaving on their own,
or erased through WordPress’s privacy tools — a negative balance (refunds that
arrived after they were paid) is written off with a recorded ledger row, so
nobody is asked to pay money back. The exception is a creator you archive as
removed for fraud: their balance is kept as it is, and approving them
again later clears that mark.

Status

ShareCrew runs on a live WooCommerce store. Its money rules are covered by
an append-only ledger with checked invariants, twenty-nine profit-share
fixtures verified to the cent, and a property test over randomised order,
refund and payout sequences. Questions and reports are welcome in the
support forum.