This guide explains how you can use a coupon system to charge some of your freelancers a lower commission on the work they do on your talent platform. You can also view our guide on reducing commissions based on income, subscriptions and referrals (number of new users invited by a freelancer).
Video Guide
Step by Step Guide
In your admin Dashboard under the Settings menu item is the option to ‘Allow freelancers to reduce your commission based on their activities?’ Enabling this feature allows the administrator to enter a coupon code (any combination of letters and numbers) with a % reduction on the platforms base commission.
For the freelancer to input a coupon code when registering to your platform, you must enable the feature ‘Display a referral field on the user registration pages? (Optional)’ which will give them a discounted commission fee.
There is an extra feature that can be enabled which will auto-fill the referral field with your coupon code, ‘Enable URLs to auto-fill text into the referral fields of the registration pages? (Optional)’.
When this feature is enabled it allows any code to be passed through this URL structure:
YourMarketplace.com/register?referralCode=INPUT_CODE_HERE, where any combination of words or letters after the = symbol will auto-fill the ‘referral code’ input section with that combination. An example of this url is demo.whitelance.co/register?referralCode=xyz123. This can be hyperlinked to your marketing website or on a social media page to reduce commissions for users that register within a marketing campaign.
In the image below a 1% deduction on the platform’s base commission will be given to any freelancer that enters the code ‘xyz123’ when registering to your talent platform.
The base commission your platform is charging its contractor workforce can be set and changed from the Payment Gateway menu item of your dashboard, in the ‘Commission fee’ field.
This coupon system is useful for marketing campaigns or incentivizing your users to refer other users to receive a discount upon registration.
After a freelancer has completed a task and has been paid for it they will be invoiced the platforms updated commission fee, as seen in the image below.
In this example the freelancer completed a task valued at £10. The platforms base commission was 10% and the freelancer registered with the coupon code ‘xyz123’, which gave them a 1% discount. The marketplace has charged the freelancer £0.90 for finding work through their platform and additionally charged tax on the commission fee and Stripe’s admin fee.
A referral coupon code can manually be added or removed from a user’s account in the admin dashboard. Go to Users –> find the user and click ‘View’. This will open that users details, where the ‘Referral Code’ window can be updated and saved, as shown in the image below. In this way an admin can reduce a user’s commission for a set time, by manually removing the referral code when their grace period is over.
