"Can we just pay them a percentage of what they sell?"
That question comes up in most first conversations about creator marketing, usually right after the brand sees a rate card. It is a fair question. It is also the structure that fails most often in Australia, and the reasons are structural rather than a matter of finding the right creator. This is what actually gets signed here, what to put in the contract, and the one thing that has to exist before you propose performance pay at all. If you want the scope of the work rather than the deal structure, our influencer and creator marketing page covers that.
Why brands ask for commission, and what creators hear
From the brand side the logic is clean. Pay for outcomes, cap the downside, align incentives. Nobody argues with that in principle.
From the creator side the same offer reads differently. You are asking them to be paid on variables they have no authority over: your price, your landing page, your stock levels, your checkout, your seasonality, your returns policy. A creator who accepts pure commission is accepting payment based on decisions made entirely inside your business.
There is a second effect that brands rarely think about. The creators who say yes to commission-only are disproportionately the ones without other offers on the table. You have not built an incentive structure, you have built a filter, and it screens out the people you wanted.
The three ways money moves in a creator deal
Flat fee. You buy defined deliverables and defined usage rights for a defined period. Predictable for both sides, and what most negotiations are actually about.
Performance. Commission on tracked sales through a unique code or link, or a fixed amount per qualified lead.
In kind. Product, service or treatment instead of cash. Common in beauty, hospitality and dental, and workable at the smaller end.
Most deals that get signed and produce something are a hybrid of the first two. The rest of this is about how to build that hybrid so it survives contact with reality.
Why pure commission usually fails in Australia
Attention is what you are buying, conversion is not. A creator sells access to an audience and a degree of borrowed credibility. Whether that turns into a sale is decided by your offer, your price and your page. Paying only on conversion means paying for something the seller cannot deliver.
Australian audiences are small. A creator here works with a fraction of the follower count of a comparable US account. A commission rate that produces a real number against a large American audience produces pocket change against twenty thousand engaged followers in Sydney, and the creator can do that arithmetic faster than you can.
Neither side can forecast it, so neither side can price it. A creator cannot compare your commission offer against a flat fee from another brand without guessing your conversion rate. Faced with a number they can bank and a number they have to model, most take the first one.
It reads as no budget. Fairly or not, commission-only signals a brand that cannot pay. That shapes who returns your email, and it travels. Creator managers and agents talk to each other, and a brand that has approached ten creators with a commission-only offer has told the market something about itself before it has run a single campaign.
When commission actually works
Five conditions. All five, not three.
There is history. At least one paid campaign already run, so both sides have real numbers instead of projections.
The creator already uses the product, or would plausibly buy it. Genuine use is what makes repeated, evergreen mentions possible, and evergreen is where commission earns out.
Average order value is high enough that one sale matters. Commission on a $30 product is not a business for anyone.
Attribution genuinely works. Covered in the next section. This is the condition that ends most attempts, usually months in, when the two sides discover they were counting different things.
The window is long. Performance pay rewards content that keeps working. A one week campaign push does not give it time to compound.
The strongest version of this is almost never "commission instead of a fee". It is "we have run this twice, here is exactly what it produced, now let us add upside on top".
The hybrid that gets signed
A reduced flat fee, paid on delivery, plus a performance component on top. What belongs in writing:
- The base fee, paid on delivery of the content, not on results
- The performance component, per sale or per qualified lead, with the definition of qualified written down in plain words
- The tracking method, named specifically, and who owns the resulting data
- The attribution window, in days, agreed before launch
- Reporting cadence, who produces the report, and what happens if the two sides see different numbers
- What happens if tracking breaks. Everyone skips this clause and eventually everyone needs it. The workable version is a fallback flat amount for the affected period
- Usage rights, priced separately. Whether you can run the content as paid media, for how long, and on which platforms is a separate commercial question from how you pay for the post. Our creator cost guide goes through what each of those lines is worth
Tracking has to exist before you propose it
This is where most Australian small and mid-sized brands come unstuck. Four options, each with a real weakness:
Unique discount codes. Simple, work in store and offline, understood by everyone. They undercount, because codes get shared and found on coupon sites, and they cut your margin on every single sale whether or not that creator caused it.
Unique links and UTMs. Better data, no margin cost. They break across devices, and they lose the large group of people who see the content, do nothing, then search your brand name three days later and buy. That person was created by the creator and will never be attributed to them.
A dedicated landing page per creator. Cleanest attribution and the best experience. More build cost, and if you are careless it splits your search signal across near duplicate pages.
Asking at checkout. A "how did you hear about us" field is crude, cheap, and catches exactly the traffic the other three methods miss. Use it alongside, not instead.
Whichever you pick, agree in advance what happens to the gap. Every method above undercounts, and the creator knows it. A brand that acknowledges the gap and offers a slightly higher rate to compensate gets better terms than one that pretends the tracked number is the true number.
One rule covers all of it. If you cannot answer "how will both of us see the same number on the fifth of next month" before signing, do not propose a commission deal. Ambiguous attribution does not produce a cheap campaign, it produces a dispute.
Disclosure does not change because the payment changed
A commission or affiliate arrangement is a commercial relationship, and in Australia it has to be disclosed like any other. Advertising must be clearly identifiable as advertising under the AANA Code of Ethics, and the Australian Consumer Law prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct regardless of how the creator was paid.
Brands occasionally assume that because no fee changed hands up front, an affiliate post is "not really an ad". It is. The obligation sits on the creator and on the brand that engaged them, and writing the disclosure requirement into the agreement protects both sides. If you are running creator content into the Chinese market channels as well, the same principle applies, with platform rules layered on top.
What we see in our own campaigns
We run creator work through our own KOL intelligence platform, which means deal terms across a large number of Australian creators sit in one place rather than in somebody's inbox. The pattern is consistent. Pure commission proposals mostly do not get accepted by the creators a brand actually wants, and the ones who do accept tend to underdeliver on content quality, because unpaid work gets done last.
The campaigns that produce start with a flat fee and add performance once there is a track record. TickShop runs a 16 account matrix with us across Xiaohongshu, Instagram and TikTok, at 300%+ follower growth in the first 60 days and 800,000+ views. T32, a Sydney dental clinic, launched with five creators and was taking bookings in its opening week. Boundless added 600+ followers in six weeks with average views past 1,000 after a research led reset. Read the cases.
Before you send the proposal
Five questions. Answer them honestly first.
- Have you run a paid campaign with this creator before, with numbers you both agree on?
- Is one sale worth enough to be worth tracking?
- Can you name the tracking method and the attribution window right now, without checking?
- Are you offering a reduced fee plus upside, or asking someone to work for free and hope?
- Does your contract say what happens when tracking breaks?
If three or more answers are no, propose a flat fee for the first campaign and revisit performance pay once you have data worth sharing.
Want a read on how to structure yours?
Free 30 minutes: what the deliverables are actually worth, whether performance pay fits your product, and what to put in the agreement. One team, in English and Chinese. Send us a message.