WP eStore | Tips and Tricks WP eCommerce

How to Setup a Revenue Sharing Product Selling Site (Split Profit Setup)

If you are setting up a revenue sharing site (to split profit with a partner) whereby you want to share the profit of the products with the author/creator of the product then you can use the “Revenue Sharing” feature of WP eStore.

How Revenue Sharing Works

WP eStore allows you to setup a revenue sharing site with the help of the WP Affiliate Software. Basically, you setup your authors as an affiliate then specify the affiliate ID of each author to their corresponding products when setting up the product in eStore (this links the author with a particular product). When a product is sold, eStore checks to see if this product is using revenue sharing. If revenue sharing is used for that product then it awards the appropriate amount to the corresponding author of the product in the form of affiliate commission. The commissions will keep accruing whenever this product sells. You can then payout all the outstanding commission (the authors share) at the end of the month or week or whatever.

How to Use the Revenue Sharing Feature

Step1: Enable the revenue sharing feature from the “AddOn” settings menu of WP eStore

Enable Revenue Sharing

Step2: Create an affiliate account for each of your authors/product creators (You can create affiliate account from the “Add/Edit Affiliates” menu of the WP Affiliate Platform plugin)

Step3: Specify the corresponding affiliate ID in the “Author ID for Revenue Sharing” section of the product when configuring the product in eStore.

Linking a product to a revenue sharing author

Additionally, you can override the commission level to be used for this product’s revenue sharing calculation by specifying a number in the “Revenue Sharing Commission Level” field. This field is not mandatory. If you do not specify any value in this field it will simply use the commission level specified in the author/affiliate’s profile for revenue sharing calculation.

How the Revenue Sharing Cuts Work For Normal Transactions

The revenue sharing for normal transactions are very straightforward. The “author/partner” gets the percent specified in the revenue sharing section for the product.

For example, lets say it is a $100 Product and you have specified the author/partner to get 50%. The calculation will look like the following:

50% author’s cut (so the author of the product gets $50)
The leftover is for the house ($50 in this case).

How the Revenue Sharing Cuts Work When Used Together with Normal Affiliate Commission

When revenue sharing is used in conjunction with a normal affiliate campaign then the calculation works like the following:

For exmaple, lets say it is a $100 Product and you specified the author to get 50% and the affiliates to get %50. The calculation will look like the following:

50% affiliate commission (so affiliate gets $50)
50% author commission (the author of the product gets 50% of profit). The affiliate commission is deducted from the product price and then the author gets 50% of the left over. So in this case the author will get 50% of ($100-$50) which equals to $25.
The leftover is for the house ($25 in this case).

WP eStore Tax Calculation

Charging sales tax for your products when using WP eStore plugin to sell your product(s) is very easy. There are a few ways you can use the tax feature of eStore:

Use the built-in tax feature of eStore.
Use the PayPal’s profile based tax feature.
Use the table rate tax addon.
Use the TaxCloud integration.

Using the Built-in Tax Feature of eStore

Simply enable the tax calculation option from the settings menu and specify the tax rate for your store and that’s it.

WP eStore Tax Settings

Sometimes you maybe selling product(s) where sales tax is not applicable or you may want to charge a different tax rate for a particular item. With eStore you can achieve that by overriding the tax rate for a particular product from the individual product’s tax option:

Overriding Sales Tax for an Individual Product

The sales tax is displayed in the shopping cart when the tax feature is enabled (the following is an example screenshot of the shopping cart with tax feature enabled)

WP eStore Cart Screenshot

Using the PayPal Profile Based Tax Feature

Please see the how to use regional or international sales tax when selling via PayPal post for this option.

WP eStore Table Rate Tax

Table rate tax allows you to charge tax in the shopping cart based on the customer’s country. See the table rate tax addon page for details.

Table Rate Tax by Item Type

The Table Rate Tax by Item Types addon allows you to charge tax in the shopping cart based on the user’s country and type of items they are purchasing.

Using TaxCloud Integration

WP eStore has an integration with TaxCloud, a free sales tax management service, to automatically calculate tax for every address in the United States.

View the eStore TaxCloud addon page to get more details on this integration.

WP eStore and MemberWing Plugin Integration

WP eStore can be integrated with the MemberWing Plugin.

MemberWing Plugin Integration Steps

Step 1: You will need one piece of information from the MemberWing plugin. So browse to the “Integration with other systems” menu from the “MemberWing-X” section of your WordPress Dashboard:

Admin dashboard => MemberWing-X => Integration with other systems

Step 2: Copy the URL from “MemberWing Universal Paypal Postback URL” field. It will look something like the following:

http://www.your-domain.com/wp-content/plugins/memberwing-x/mwx-notify-paypal.php?mwx_api_key=dfb0e9e3b9359541&skip_postback=1

Step 3: Browse to the “3rd Party Integration” tab from the WP eStore’s settings menu and paste the above URL in the “MemberWing Integration Settings” section:

MemberWing Plugin Integration

All done, now when someone makes a purchase using a payment button configured using eStore, it will automatically create a membership account for that customer.