X-Cart:Provider commissions
Many owners of multi-vendor stores based on X-Cart PRO would like to charge their providers a certain fee for using the store site to sell their products. Whereas this model of building a business on X-Cart PRO is by all means possible, it is worth noting that X-Cart PRO does not provide any facility for handling payments between the providers and the store owner. When a product is sold through a store based on X-Cart PRO, the money from the sale goes to the merchant account of the store owner, whereas any further payments - including the transfer of earnings from the sale from the store owner to the provider and the transfer of the fee for using the store site from the provider to the store owner - must be taken care of outside X-Cart.
However, if you charge your providers a fee for using the store site as a percentage from each sale of their products through your store (the same percent for all provider accounts), X-Cart can help you to calculate how much you owe to each of your providers from each sale after the deduction of the fee they owe you. It also allows you to keep a record of payments you make to your providers so that at any moment you can check which payments have already been made and which are yet to be made. Your providers can also see their income from each sale and find out the status of the respective payent in their personal provider backends.
Enabling the calculation of payments to providers
To enable X-Cart to calculate the amount due for payment to each of your providers, you need to set your Providers commission rate (%) and Minimum commission payment values. These values are set globally by adjusting the respective settings on the General settings page (Settings menu -> General settings) in your store's Admin area:
The Providers commission rate (%) setting defines the percentage of the order subtotal that a provider will earn by selling products through your store. For example, if you need to give 95% of the order subtotal back to the provider as their earnings, withholding 5% of the subtotal for allowing the provider to sell through the store site, you should set this value to 95.
The Minimum commission payment setting defines the minimum amount a provider must earn at their account before they can get paid.
Viewing and managing information about payments to providers
In Admin area, information about payments to providers can be found on the Provider commissions page (Orders menu -> Provider commissions). This page provides a search form that allows you to search and filter records about payments to providers:
The fields in the form stand for the following:
- Date from and Date through: The start and end dates of the period for which you want to display data on payments to providers.
- Order id: The ID number of the order. Should be entered if you are searching for a payment related to a specific order.
- Partner: The name and username of the provider for whom you want to display payments data. Select All to display payments data for all the providers.
- Order status: Select an order status to display payments related to orders with the specified status only. Select All to display payments regardless of the order status.
- Payment status: Select a payment status to display records with a particular payment status only. The possible values are: pending, approved and paid. Or select All to display records regardless of the payment status.
To find specific records, you need to complete the form and click the Search button. The search results will be displayed in a table like the following:
