Marketplace Merchant Commission feature overview

The Marketplace Merchant Commissions feature enables marketplace owners to monetize their services by calculating a fee on sales made through their platform. This feature allows for flexible commission structures, such as fixed fees, percentage-based fees, or a combination of both. Commissions can apply differently across various categories, products, or sellers. For example, you might want to collect a smaller commission from merchants that sell products in categories with smaller selling volumes.

Managing merchant commissions

A Back Office user can import commissions by following Import merchant commissions in the Back Office.

Applying merchant commissions conditionally

Conditions are used to identify which commission is to be applied. Conditions can be applied to individual items or orders.

Conditions are based on the following criteria:

• Product attribute, like brand or color.
• Product category, like Electronics.
• Item price, for example—a price range of 100€ to 200€.
• Product SKU
• Merchant, like ACME Inc.

For a commission to be applied to an item or order, the item or order needs to fulfill all the conditions defined for a commission.

Product attribute conditions

To specify conditions based on attributes, the following format is used: attribute.{ATTRIBUTE_KEY} {OPERATOR} '{ATTRIBUTE_VALUE}'.

Examples:

• Apply commission to all black products: attribute.color = 'black'

• Apply commission to all black and blue products: attribute.color IS IN 'black;blue'

Product category conditions

To specify conditions based on categories, the following format is used: category {OPERATOR} '{CATEGORY_VALUE}'

Examples:

• Apply commission to all products in the Electronics category: category IS IN 'electronics'
• Apply commission to all products in the Smartphones and Smartwatches categories: category IS IN 'smartphones;smartwatches'.

If a category has child categories, applying a commission to the category applies it to the child categories too. For example, applying commission to the Electronics category also apply it to the Smart Watches category. So, you might want to set up conditions using child categories or exclude some child categories.

Item price conditions

To specify conditions based on item prices, the following format is used: item-price {OPERATOR} '{PRICE_VALUE}'

Example: item-price > '2' AND item-price <= '10.99'.

SKU-based conditions

To specify conditions based on SKU, use the following format: SKU {OPERATOR} {SKU_VALUE}

Example: SKU IS IN '136_24425591;134_29759322'

Price mode based commissions

To specify conditions based on price mode, use the following format: price-mode = '{PRICE_MODE}'. For example, price-mode = 'GROSS_MODE'.

This can be useful if you want different commissions to be applied to orders in different prices modes.

Combining conditions

Conditions can be combined using AND and OR operators. Examples:

• category IS IN 'electronics';smart-watches' AND attribute.color IS IN 'black;blue'
• category IS IN 'electronics';smart-watches' OR attribute.color IS IN 'black;blue'

When conditions are combined by the OR operator, they don’t exclude each other. If an order fulfills both such conditions, the commission is still applied.

Inclusion operators

contains and does not contain operators are supported by default for conditions based on attributes, item-price, categories, and SKU. We don’t recommend using these operators to avoid accidental matches or matches caused by typos. For example, cartoon contains art. However, this might be useful when using special characters in product attributes.

Applying commissions to specific merchants

The merchants_allow_list attribute lets you apply a commission to one or more particular merchants. This is useful when you only want to apply a commission to some of your merchants; or when you have a universal commission for most merchants and a special commission for some of them. For example, your setup could be as follows. We simplified the commissions for this example by removing irrelevant fields.

In the prior example, the system first checks if an order is fulfilled by merchants MER000002 or MER000004. If this condition is fulfilled, the mc01 commission is applied. If an order is fulfilled by any other merchant, the standard commission mc02 is applied. The empty merchants_allow_list attribute means that this commission applies to all merchants.

If you have multiple commissions, depending on your setup, you will have to use priorities and groups to make sure that relevant commissions are applied. In the prior example, the merchant-specific commission with priority 1 is validated before the universal commission. If the merchant-specific commission had a lower priority, the universal commission would be applied because it doesn’t have a merchant condition. For more details about priority, see Merchant commission priority and groups.

Merchant commission priority and groups

Priority and groups are used to make sure relevant commissions are applied when there are multiple commissions in a system.

Merchant commission groups are used for complex commission scenarios, for example—when you need to apply several commissions per order. By default, there are primary and secondary commission groups. When there’re multiple commission groups in a shop, for each order, the system checks if a commission from each group can be applied.

Merchant commission priority is used to define which commission is to be applied within a commission group. Priority is defined in an ascending order starting from 1. If multiple commissions have the same priority, the last created commission is applied.

For example, your setup could be as follows. We simplified the commissions for this example by removing irrelevant fields.

If an order item fulfills the conditions of all the commissions in the prior example, commissions MC01 and MC04 are applied. First, the system selects commission MC01 as the commission with the highest priority in the Primary group. Then, the system selects commission MC04 as the commission with the highest priority in the Secondary group.

Apply commissions to GROSS or NET price

The price mode used to apply commissions is defined by the order price mode. This price mode configuration controls which prices are used as a basis to calculate commission: gross or net price. The item gross price and net price is configured in the backend, including volume pricing, and doesn’t include any discounts applied in the shopping cart afterwards.

For information on setting up commission percentages per price mode, see Price mode based commissions.

Applying merchant commissions to the sum item total price to pay after discounts with additions

You might want to change how commission is calculated on the project level by applying commissions to the sum item total price to pay after discounts with additions. In Glue API, this is represented by sumPriceToPayAggregation. This can be useful when you want to apply commissions to total paid by a customer a line item. This amount is what the customer is getting charged.

This customization is factored into the application design. A developer can change this logic within two hours by following Create merchant commission calculator type plugins.

Other use cases might be as follows:

• Differently calculate commission for product price, including product options.
• Differently calculate commission for special products like bundles or configurable products.

Multiple ways to calculate commissions affect commission totals, so you might want to set up different commission rules accordingly. For example, 10% commission for the Net mode and 12% commission for the Gross mode.

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