What Are Transactions?

A transaction is Siren’s financial record of a purchase. It captures the full breakdown of what the customer bought and what they paid, including products, subscriptions, discounts, fees, shipping, and taxes. Every conversion that results in a reward is tied back to a transaction, and the transaction is where Siren finds the numbers it needs to calculate what a collaborator is owed.

How transactions get into Siren

Most transactions are created automatically. When a customer completes a purchase in WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, LifterLMS, or NorthCommerce, the active integration pushes the order into Siren as a transaction. The integration copies over every line item, applied coupon, shipping charge, and tax line so Siren has a complete picture of the sale.

You can also create transactions by hand. If a sale happened outside your normal commerce flow (a phone order, an invoice paid by wire, or a refund correction), the Transactions screen in the Siren admin lets you build a transaction manually and attach line items to it. See Creating Transactions Manually for the full workflow.

One transaction, many conversions

A single transaction can be linked to multiple conversions. This happens whenever more than one program has a reason to pay out on the same purchase. An affiliate who referred the customer earns a commission through an affiliate program. The author of the book the customer bought earns a royalty through a separate royalty program. Both conversions point at the same transaction and pull their reward calculations from the same underlying data.

When a transaction is reversed through a refund, every conversion tied to it is rejected automatically, and any unpaid obligations that came from those conversions are rejected along with them.

Line items and why their types matter

Everything on a transaction is stored as a line item. Each line item has a type, and the type tells Siren what kind of financial data it represents. Products and subscriptions are the items being sold. Fees are extra charges like signup fees or setup fees. Discounts are coupons or promotions that reduced the total. Shipping and tax are exactly what they sound like.

Siren categorizes line items this way because commission calculations almost always care about the distinction. Most programs pay on the product subtotal after discounts, and exclude shipping and tax because those don’t represent revenue the business actually keeps. A royalty program might only count line items for products the collaborator owns. A subscription program might only count subscription line items and ignore one-time products in the same cart.

The rules for which line items count are configured on each program and distributor through transaction compilers and filters. See Transaction Filtering for how to set up which parts of a transaction drive commission, and which parts are ignored.

For developers: This concept maps to the TransactionCreated event. See the events reference for the full pipeline.