CLUB REFERRALS

A DØLL brings someone into the CLUB. The member says her name at checkout. She earns 80% of what that member pays, every cycle they stay. Not a signup bounty that pays once.

The code

Your code is a name, not a hash: 3 to 14 characters, letters and numbers, claimed once and yours after that. zoe, Zoe and @zoe all resolve to ZOE, because the whole program rests on someone typing a name from memory.

It travels three ways. Your link, paythedolls.com/club/<code>, which remembers you for 30 days and fills the field in for them. The field itself on the join sheet, for when someone heard your name out loud. And the discount box at checkout, which we accept because people will use it anyway, but which only ever attributes the first payment.

What happens at checkout

The name is captured on our join sheet, before the hand-off, and rides into Shopify as a line-item property on the subscription line. It prints under the product at checkout, on the confirmation and on the order:

PAY THE DØLLS CLUB          $5.00
DL · MONTHLY
Referred by · ZOE
SUBSCRIPTION · $5.00 EVERY MONTH

The buyer seeing it is the point. Attribution here is a statement, not a tracking pixel, which is also why it cannot be gamed by last-touch link stuffing.

Alongside the visible line ride three hidden ones. A key beginning with an underscore is machine-only and never shown: _ref_code, _ref_at and _ref_src, which records whether the name arrived by link, by field, or typed. All four, on the order and on everything the order becomes:

Why it survives month two

Shopify copies a subscription line’s attributes onto the subscription contract, and every renewal order it raises carries them forward. So the attribution repeats without anyone re-entering anything and without us tracking the member.

A second record is written on the customer on the first paid order, as a backstop for a rebuilt contract, a tier change, or someone who lapses and comes back. Either mechanism alone has a hole.

What that buys you

A bar is a month, a clip is a cycle that billed. The reason the attribution has to survive a renewal is the whole shape of this picture: the work happens once, on the left edge, and the payment does not.

The rate

80% of the dues, after the member’s own store credit comes off. The upper rungs hand a member credit back every month; taking the referral on the gross instead would mean paying out more than the membership brings in. This keeps the same rate on every rung rather than a smaller one on all of them.

Quarterly and annual cycles net out that many months of credit and pay the same 80% of what is left. Prices and credit live on the tier board and are not restated here.

Getting paid

• Every earning holds for 30 days before it is payable, which is the refund and chargeback window. A refunded cycle reverses; a paid one is never clawed back.
• They cancel, the lane ends. No penalty and no balance owed.
• It is income, not store credit. A W-9 before the first payout and a 1099-NEC above $600 in a calendar year. One DL member who stays a year is $48, so this arrives sooner than people expect. Nothing here is tax advice.
• Payouts are run by hand. See Getting paid for the general shape of how money leaves the platform.

The rules

• No referring yourself. Your own code on your own membership does not qualify.
• Disclose it. Saying you are paid for this is a legal requirement in most places.
• No coupon aggregators. It is a name you give people, not a discount to scrape, and it changes nobody’s price.
• No paid search on our own terms. Bidding on the brand name to intercept traffic that was already ours pays nothing.

Status