Three numbers to keep apart: list price, rate, payout
"Commission rate" is a percentage, and it applies to the amount the product actually sold for, not the list price on the product page. That one sentence explains most of the gap.
"Payout" is what actually reaches your account according to the dashboard reports, after discounts, returns and ineligible orders come off. The same video and the same product can produce different amounts in different campaign periods.
So if the numbers are going to reconcile, the base has to be the transaction amount, not the list price. A figure calculated from list price is a ceiling, not income.
One-line formula, but every field has to be right
Commission = (transaction amount − seller-funded discounts and shipping) × commission rate.
In most cases hovering over the dashboard report shows the breakdown, but the report gives you the result, not the working. When something is off, you have to know which field is wrong yourself.
To check the math, split one order into four columns: list price, transaction amount, commission rate, commission amount. If the four do not line up, you know immediately which one to go back and verify.
- List price: the price on the product page — a reference point only, never the basis of the calculation
- Transaction amount: what the buyer actually paid for the product, discounts included
- Commission rate: the percentage shown on the current notice or product page, which moves with category and campaign
- Commission amount: the payout in the report — this is the number you reconcile against
Worked at three price points (illustrative figures)
The numbers below are invented for the sake of the arithmetic. They are not official rates; check the current notice in Seller Centre and the product page for real percentages.
At a 5% rate on orders of 199, 899 and 2,490, you get 9.95, 44.95 and 124.5. At 10%, you get 19.9, 89.9 and 249.
What this shows is not the size of the numbers but the structure: the commission on an order is driven almost entirely by the transaction amount, not by how the video performed. The video changes how many orders there are, not how much each one pays.
That is why one viral video and ten ordinary videos are hard to compare directly. The first might bring three high-value orders; the second might bring thirty low-value ones. To compare, go back to the breakdown: total commission = number of orders × average transaction amount × commission rate. Three variables, and you only directly control which rate you take — the first two depend on content.
Why the payout is smaller than your math
When the dashboard shows less than you calculated, it is usually not a missing term but one of the items below taking effect. Checking them one by one beats recalculating.
The attribution window is the most commonly overlooked: the buyer clicked your link and ordered a few days later, and the length of that gap decides whether the order counts as yours. Duplicate attribution means several links touched the same order, and only one of them is credited.
- Returns and cancellations: if an order is cancelled or returned inside the attribution window, commission usually does not stand or is clawed back
- Discount source: seller-funded discounts and platform subsidies are treated differently in the calculation
- Shipping: usually excluded from the commission base, though some campaigns change the rule
- Attribution window: how long between click and order still counts, per the current rules
- Duplicate attribution: an order is credited to only one link
Rates are not fixed — how to check the current number
The rate moves with product category, campaign period and seller settings. There is no figure you can hard-code into an article, which is why people keep calculating new orders with last year's percentage.
Try all three checks once: the live rate on the product page, the campaign rules in the notice, and a reverse calculation from your own reports. The third is worth the most, because it measures the products in your hands rather than a site-wide average.
The reverse calculation is simple: commission actually paid over the last 30 days ÷ transaction amount actually generated in the same window. Once you have 30 orders or more behind it, that number gives you better judgement than any notice.
The three most common calculation mistakes
The first is calculating from list price. Discount campaigns make you overestimate, and with enough campaign periods the error can reach 20–30% without you ever spotting where it came from.
The second is treating the rate as fixed. Apply last month's percentage to this month and everything shifts the moment the campaign changes, so you conclude that orders got worse.
The third is looking only at the total and not at the order count. When the total falls you assume the rate dropped, when in fact you took fewer orders — and the fixes run in opposite directions: the first means changing category or waiting for a campaign, the second means adjusting content and publishing cadence.
Once you can calculate it, map it back to a specific video
At five videos a day and a hundred-odd a month, the problem is no longer that you cannot calculate the number — it is that once you have it, you do not know which video to credit. Reports give you orders, not content.
So keep a per-video record when you publish: which clip, when it went out, success or failure. With that record you can map a batch of orders back to specific videos, and you know which angle to make more of next month.
ShopeePilot covers this stretch: organize the video list from an Excel sheet or a folder scan, publish in sequence on your own accounts and devices, and keep success or failure detail for every item. Commission amounts still come from the official dashboard; the tool does not calculate them and makes no earnings guarantee.