ShareCrew — Creator Profit-Share for WooCommerce

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.

0.1.7

• Let approved creators rename their campaign labels without changing referral links, destinations or earnings.
• Refuse stale edits and record confirmed changes in the audit trail; uncertain saves require checking the current label.

0.1.6

• Keep editor blocks available on supported older WordPress versions.
• Show creators which payout method, tax-profile or balance requirements need attention using the same eligibility rules as merchant payout runs.
• Keep currencies separate, distinguish unavailable readiness from an empty balance, and link to local recovery steps without promising or sending payment.

0.1.5

• Refuse stale payout exports and settlement attempts before reporting success or downloading a file.
• Protect payout and audit transactions against failed commits, nested failures and database reconnects; ambiguous outcomes require review.
• Keep paid store credit available when another settlement attempt or notification fails.
• Initialize payout emails without warnings on the minimum supported WooCommerce version.

0.1.4

• Keep payout dates, creator post dates and reapplication notices aligned with the store calendar while retaining UTC timestamp storage.
• Schedule daily work by local calendar time across daylight-saving and timezone changes, recover interrupted schedule migration, and serialize overlapping daily callbacks with durable completion receipts.

0.1.3

• Fixed: archived creator links no longer record new visits. Referral cookies respect Codes only mode and expire at the exact attribution boundary.
• Fixed: interrupted checkout attribution can repair order metadata and finish commission and customer-lock work before marking the receipt complete. Retries preserve completed work and prevent overlapping hook processing.

0.1.2

• Changing the link base in Settings now takes effect on the next page load. Before, links on the new base answered "not found" until permalinks were saved again.
• Links on a previous link base keep working: they redirect to the same creator's link on the new base, so links already shared or printed as QR codes do not break.
• Changed: saving on a ShareCrew admin screen now shows that it is working, then moves keyboard focus to the result, so you — and a screen reader — know at once whether the save worked. A failed save says so in a message you can dismiss, next to the form, instead of a paragraph above it.

0.1.1

• A refused request (a user without permission to manage ShareCrew) now answers 403 Forbidden instead of a server error.
• The creator detail screen's main link follows your link base setting instead of always showing /go/.
• Settings help text now matches what the plugin does: in Codes only mode a customer lock still credits an order and WooCommerce's order attribution is not read, and a payout run includes every commission payable when the run is created.

0.1.0

• First release. Attribution resolves a code, a referral link and cookie, WooCommerce's own order-attribution data, a repeat-customer lock, or a manual assignment, in that order, and freezes the reason onto each commission row.
• The profit-share engine computes a per-order breakdown from WooCommerce's Cost of Goods Sold, a cost custom field, a category margin or a global margin, with shipping, packaging and payment-fee estimates, and shares a percentage of profit or of revenue, or pays a fixed amount per order: one basis for the program, with the rate set by tier and overridable per creator, product or category.
• An unknown cost holds the commission rather than assuming zero; a safety ceiling on the computed amount holds and caps rather than paying an amount a data error produced.
• Commission and payout rows are append-only: a correction is a new row, and a paid row is never edited.
• Creator codes are real WooCommerce coupons the plugin owns and can rotate in one click.
• Payout runs export a PayPal CSV, a bank-transfer CSV, or issue WooCommerce store credit with an optional bonus, and record a numbered statement per creator; marking a run paid is always a separate action from creating it.
• Creators progress through tiers based on trailing profit generated, with per-creator, per-product and per-category rate overrides.
• Gift orders: an approved gift request creates a real, paid WooCommerce order with its own cost counted against the creator's tiers.
• Per-post links let a creator track a specific piece of content, with self-reported view and engagement figures, clearly labelled as self-reported.
• A daily leak monitor flags a code whose recent use looks unusual — a spike in uses with no click behind them, or referrals from a known coupon-site domain — for a human to review; nothing is voided automatically.
• Nineteen transactional emails cover the creator's and the merchant's side of the program, from application through payout.
• A WordPress privacy exporter and eraser cover a creator's own data; commission and payout amounts are kept as accounting records after erasure, the way WooCommerce keeps order records.
• The merchant console adds an Overview with program ROI, Creators, Applications, a Commissions screen with a per-order breakdown drawer, and Settings, under the shared WP Shelf admin menu.
• A public application form and a program-summary block/shortcode let visitors apply and read the program's terms without an account.
• Links-only mode: no codes and no audience discount, with every surface speaking only of the link; switching back restores the creators' coupons.
• Creator-funded discounts: each creator picks their code's discount inside a range you set and pays it from their share, never below zero.
• A negative balance is written off when a creator leaves, except for a creator removed for fraud; re-approval clears that mark.
• Compatible with WooCommerce's High-Performance Order Storage and block-based checkout.