Clawback (Chargeback)

A clawback reverses a commission after the fact, and it is triggered by something invalidating the underlying conversion: a refund, a cancellation, a failed or charged-back payment, a subscription that lapses inside a minimum retention period, or a fraud review that rejects the order. The commission moves out of pending or approved and into reversed.

How the money comes back depends on timing. If the commission has not been paid, the program simply cancels it. If it has, the amount is almost always deducted from the partner's next payout rather than invoiced, which is why a partner can see a payout arrive smaller than the statement they read last week.

Clawbacks are why gross earnings are not a forecast. In categories with high return rates — apparel especially — the gap between gross and net commission is large enough that planning against gross is planning against a number that never existed.

Two habits reduce them. Set expectations accurately in the content, since overselling produces returns, and watch your own reversal rate per program: a rate far above the others is usually telling you the product does not match what your audience expects.

Clawbacks keep the program honest, because without them any refunded order would still be paid for. The rule should be narrow, written down, and applied identically to every partner.

What turns a fair mechanism into a churn engine is opacity. A reversal with no order reference and no reason reads as the program taking money arbitrarily, and partners respond by moving their traffic rather than by asking.