Assign Product Owners

A product owner is a collaborator who earns when their product sells, such as the creator of a course, the author of an ebook, or a vendor on a marketplace. No referral link or coupon is needed. The sale itself credits them, through a program that tracks Collaborator Product Sold. A product can have up to 10 owners. Earning from products needs Siren Essentials or higher.

On Siren Cloud, you can also set owners on the Products screen, where Stripe and Shopify products get their owners. Siren keeps its own record of each product, and each store’s own record of it is a listing. A product starts with one listing. When you merge the same product from several stores, it holds all their listings, and its owners earn whichever store makes the sale. Manage Products on Siren Cloud explains products, listings, and merging.

Assign owners in your store

Every store plugin shows the same “Product owners” field. Click it, pick up to 10 collaborators (“Choose up to 10 collaborators”), and save the product. Where you find it:

• WooCommerce: the “Product owners” tab in the Product data box. A variation credits its parent product’s owners, so set owners on the parent product.
• Easy Digital Downloads: the “Product owners” box on the download.
• NorthCommerce: the “Product owners” card in the product form. Only an administrator can change it.
• LifterLMS: the “Product owners” box on courses and memberships.
• LearnDash: the “Product owners” box on courses and groups.
• Gravity Forms: the “Product owners” setting on each Product field in the form editor. The owners save when you save the form.

Ninja Forms has no product owners. Its form-level “Assign to Collaborator (Siren)” setting is for Form submitted.

To clear the owners, remove everyone and save. Trashing a product keeps its owners, and deleting it for good removes them. A change to the owners applies to sales from then on. Sales already credited stay with whoever owned the product at the time.

Default owners on LifterLMS and LearnDash

Courses often have an owner already: the instructor or the author. While a course, membership, or group has no owners and nobody has saved its “Product owners” box, the box offers the first instructor (LifterLMS) or the author (LearnDash) as the owner, as long as that user is a collaborator. Saving the course keeps them, and you can change them first. A course saved without the box, such as by an import, gets that owner too. Once you save the box, even with nobody in it, Siren never sets an owner for that course again.

Set up a program that pays owners

Before you start, add your owners as collaborators.

1. Create a program that tracks only Collaborator Product Sold, as Create a Program describes, or install a recipe such as the product royalty program, which comes with “Every engagement wins” and “Collaborator Owned Products Only” already set. For a program you build yourself, steps 2 and 3 set them, and for a recipe they’re a check. For a royalty, choose the Percentage of Transaction incentive with the owner’s rate, or Fixed Per Product for a flat amount per unit.
2. On the program’s “Attribution Model” card, choose “Every engagement wins”. Siren asks you to confirm, because it pays the full reward to every engaged collaborator. With the filter in the next step, each owner’s reward counts only their own products.
3. Under Commission Calculation, keep “Line Items” ticked and tick “Collaborator Owned Products Only”.
4. Enroll each owner in the program and make sure their status is Active, on their collaborator page, as Managing Collaborators describes. A collaborator group bound to the program works too.
5. Assign the owners to their products, as described above.
6. Place a test order and check that a conversion appears for each owner under Conversions.

How owners get paid

An owner earns only when they’re active and enrolled in an active program that tracks Collaborator Product Sold. Each owner of a product in the order gets their own engagement, and two settings on the program decide who is paid and on what.

The first is the program structure, the “Attribution Model” card on the program, as Create a Program describes. The second is the line item filter “Collaborator Owned Products Only”, under Commission Calculation, which shows while “Line Items” is ticked. It keeps a line only when the collaborator being paid owns that product, as Transaction Filtering explains.

For royalties and marketplaces, choose “Every engagement wins” and tick “Collaborator Owned Products Only”. Each owner then earns the program’s rate on the lines for products they own. Say a program pays 40% and an order holds Maya’s $100 course and Leo’s $50 course. Maya earns $40 and Leo earns $20. A product with two owners pays each of them the full 40% of its line.

The other combinations pay differently:

• “Every engagement wins” without the filter pays each owner on every line in the order, so Maya and Leo would each earn 40% of $150.
• A structure that picks one winner, such as “Newest engagement wins”, “Oldest engagement wins”, or “Top score wins”, pays one collaborator. With the filter on, that collaborator earns only on the lines they own.
• A shared pool with the filter cuts each owner’s reward to their own lines, then divides it among every engaged collaborator, so owners get less than their own lines earn. Don’t combine the filter with a pool.

A renewal pays whoever earned the subscription’s first sale, as Who a renewal pays describes. Several recipes create a program for this trigger, such as the product royalty program and marketplace vendor commission recipes. Each one comes with “Every engagement wins” and “Collaborator Owned Products Only”. Before the first sale, open the program and confirm both are set.

The filter applies to every conversion in the program, including ones from referral links or coupons, and a referrer who owns nothing in the order earns nothing. Run royalties as their own program, separate from your referral program.

On Siren Cloud, a Stripe or Shopify order that arrives with no referral still pays the product’s owners, as long as they’re active and in an active program that tracks Collaborator Product Sold. Connect Shopify and Connect Stripe explain how those orders are credited.

What owners see

In their portal, an owner sees a “Your products” card that lists the names of the products they earn from. Collaborators who own no products don’t see the card. The Collaborator Dashboard describes the rest of the portal.

On a WordPress site connected to Siren Cloud, the “Product owners” box saves to Siren Cloud. It offers the site’s own collaborators and those enrolled in a program that runs on that store, and keeps an owner chosen in Siren Cloud from elsewhere in your organization. Once you merge it with the same product from another store, the box turns read-only and says to change its owners in Siren Cloud, where every store that sells it is shown. A change you make in Siren Cloud can take up to 5 minutes to show in the store’s box.