I'm confused as to who receives the 'marketing fee' at the rates specified in the bottom table
Nobody. It's a fee deducted, not a commission earned.
Now/Before, if someone successfully referred a product, they received 15% of the total price paid by the customer as a referral commission. On the Designer's end, a fee equal to 20% of their gross royalty is/was deducted from it. It used to be called the referral "carve-out".
I could be totally wrong, but I feel like the terms are still fairly clear on this part meaning
As of April 1, if someone successfully refers a product, they still receive 15% of the total price paid by the customer as a referral commission. On the Designer's end, a fee equal to 35-50% of their gross royalty will be deducted from it and it's now officially called the Marketing Royalty Fee (MRF).
So as far as promoting with an RF# attached, nothing has changed except the amount of the "carve out" on the Designer's end. The fee used to always be deducted from any referred sale, whether Self or 3rd Party and it appears that will still be the case.
I think most of the confusion is stemming from the fact that previously, one had to knowingly apply to join the Promoter Program to be entitled to earning a higher referral commission when successfully promoting their own products. They could use an RF# link for 15% on anything, or gamble on using a "clean" link and earning 35% instead on their own product but zero on anyone else's. Now, there is no separate program, everyone has the option to use a RF-style link or a "clean" link to maybe earn a higher referral commission on their own product. And that commission will no longer be a flat 35%. That's the wild card we're all waiting on, how exactly that's going to be calculated now.
There isn't really any "extra".
Here's a 3rd-Party sale from my report
You can see that whoever the 3rd party was, they earned $4.68 on this. But the "carve-out" on my end as Designer was only $1.37. That's not quite even 30% of what Z paid the referrer. So Z covered the other 70%.
Using a tie as in my previous examples, with carve-out at the max of 50%, I had to go up to a 30% royalty rate for the carve-out on my end to equal the amount Z would be paying out to a Referrer.
So I think it's fair to say that in most cases, the "carve out" on Designer's end is not going to be enough to cover the expense of paying out the Referrer. So there isn't any 'extra' unless your rate is high enough that the carve-out exceeds the payout.
*Edited for typo
At 14.9% losing 5% puts you at 9.9%
As someone above said, percents of percents don't math like that.
The 14.9 is a percent of the total the customer pays, so let's say $10.00.
14.9% x $10 = $1.49 gross royalty
The 5 is a percent of that gross royalty, so
5% x $1.49 = $0.07
$1.49 gross royalty - $0.07 fee = $1.42
$1.42 = 14.2% of the total the customer paid
So you're making 14.2% of the total paid on a sale, not 9.9%.
You're only losing, in this example, half a percentage point, not 5.
