The following article will break down the next components to the commission model restructure: the Volume Commission and monthly payouts.
The Volume Commission
The important facts about the Volume Commission
- The Volume Commission is a kickback program set up to pay you a percentage of sales during a two week “campaign period”. The more items you sell in your Shop, the higher your Volume Commission.
- The Volume Commission applies only to sales in your shop.
- Each month will be split into two “campaign periods” that will be used for the calculation of your monthly Volume Commission. The campaign periods will be the 1st to the 15th of the month and the 16th to the last day of the month.
- A tiered Volume Commission will be credited to your account beginning at 11 items sold within a campaign period. The commission is calculated as a percentage of the product price plus the print price (excluding sales tax and discounts) of these items. See the Volume Commission Table below for the breakdown.
- The Affiliate Commission must be activated in your Shop in order to qualify for the Volume Commission.
Commission Breakdown:
Volume Commission Scale:
Version: April, 2016. You can find the most current table in our help article.
Additional Conditions for the Volume Commission:
- Only paid and shipped articles (excluding returns) will be calculated into your Volume Commission payout. The Volume Commission is calculated two weeks after the campaign period in order to account for returns.
- Your Volume Commission will be paid together with your regular earnings payment, but will be listed as a single and separate entry on your Sales Statistics page (User Area → Sales Statistics → Credit).
- You can find all details about the Volume Commission within the Shop Partner Terms and Conditions and the new terms for the Volume Commission.
The rollout of the Volume Commission will start at the beginning of May. The Affiliate Commission—also beginning in May—will be introduced over a period of a few days according to your Shop’s country. You will be receiving further communication at the end of April with more information about the migration.
With the improvements to the commission model, we’ll be adjusting the prices of Shop products to match those of the Marketplace. In recent years, we’ve continuously adapted prices due to the changes in the market conditions. Until now, we have been able to avoid these price fluctuations for our shop partners, but the changes in the commission model will make that unavoidable moving forward. These new prices are the basis for the payment of Affiliate Commission and the Volume Commission. Partners who do not choose to set their Affiliate Commission will see a 20% decrease in their product prices. You can find the updated price list here (version of 04.11.2016).
Monthly Commission Payouts
We’re also very happy to announce that your earnings will soon be paid on a monthly schedule. The important facts about monthly commission payments:
- Your earnings will be paid out monthly (12x/year), as opposed to the previous frequency of quarterly payments (4x/year).
- The minimum commission payout amount will be lowered to $10 for US Shops (formerly $25) and $15 for both Canadian and Australian Shops.
- Important: Due to the lower payout threshold of $10, some partners will receive the first commission payment from mid of May 2016. This is why it’s important to verify your financial data and tax information in your user area (account settings). Tax agencies require Spreadshirt to collect and report its business transactions and provide statements of income to the parties involved. If you haven’t already done so, please submit your complete and accurate tax information to Spreadshirt. If you don’t, we reserve the right to withhold commission payments of up to 30%.
- When do we get started? Changing over to monthly payouts will be realized from mid of May 2016.
- Commissions of $10 or more will be processed 14 days after the last day of each month. That means: you will receive your monthly earnings in the middle of the following month.
The changes to our commission model will require revisions to the Shop Partner Terms and Conditions and the Marketplace Terms & Conditions. We will also introduce new terms for the Volume Commission. These new provisions are valid immediately for all new Partners as well as newly-uploaded Marketplace designs. Current Partners and Marketplace Designers will be informed about these changes.
We hope that this article provides a good overview of the upcoming changes. Do you have any questions? Leave a comment below or write an email to partner@spreadshirt.com.
wpDiscuz
This hurt me so bad. I understand prices have to go up, but I lost a lot of money because of this. I have large preorders and now I’m sitting here with products I need to get printed but not enough money in hand because of the price jump. So I now have to come out of pocket and make no money off of my last 50 sales.
Thank You
Hi Laurence,
In recent years, we’ve continuously adapted prices due to the changes in the market conditions. Until now, we were able to avoid these price fluctuations for our shop partners, but the changes in the commission model made that unavoidable moving forward.
If you chose to keep the affiliate commission then you receive 20% of the print and product price. This is automatically included in the end price. If you want to earn more than the 20% then you can additionally add a design price.
Best,
Lena
So basically, the prices have shot up, by a considerable amount, and the only way to keep my store prices the same is to take a hit on my design markup?!
I have 9 stores and hundreds of designs. This is just absolutely crazy. So I either manually adjust hundreds of products to keep my prices the same and make less money (to keep customers) or just jump ship after 6 years?
Looks like I’m leaving…
Hi hwhit,
Exactly, if you sell 1001 items, you get the 60% on all of these sales.
Best,
Lena from Spreadshirt
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Yes, up to 60%, and elsewhere it’s been said that once you hit a threshold, the increased percentage applies to ALL the prior sales, not just the sales PAST that threshold. That is, if you sell 1001 items, you get the 60% on ALL OF THEM.
That’s VERY impressive for mid- to high-volume sellers. Implement design image resolution limitation (so we don’t get our designs easily ripped off anymore), and it’ll be a very nice selling platform!
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Hi Joe,
Exactly, the volume commission comes on top of the affiliate commission.
Best,
Lena from Spreadshirt
The help article answered the question. Caps at 60%: “The table below has been put together to illustrate how you can earn between 2.5% and 40% on top of the Affiliate Commission…” Awesome!
I find the new volume commission generous. Thank you. However, the graphic is unclear. The first part of the graphic suggests that the 20% affiliate commission is part of the volume commission, while the second part of the graphic says that the volume commission is added to the 20% commission. Does the total (non-design) commission cap at 40% or 60%?
Thank you also for mentioning the price “adjustments.” The products I’ve looked at show Spreadshirt’s share of each sale increasing by 9% to 36% at the low volume 20% commission. That means customer prices have to go up by at least this amount for shop owners to continue making their current commissions at low volume. Because the new commission is at least 20%, customer prices necessarily increase for any product whose old commission was less than 20% of the new, higher base prices.
I’ve waited for monthly payouts a long time. Thanks a lot! 🙂
I’m with Josh, it was fun while it lasted. I truly do appreciate the 5 years of service that Spreadshirt has provided for me, and I would like to thank everyone at Spreadshirt for that. It’s clear that Spreadshirt is headed in a direction where they no longer care to have as many small shop owners, which is fine. I think this change could have been handled in a better, more transparent way, but nobody’s perfect.
So long spreadshirt……… it was fun while it lasted.