Every order is a small settlement between three parties

A split is a small calculation run for every order line, and it should be written down as rules, not decided in spreadsheets. The seller's share is the order value minus the marketplace's commission and whatever else the seller agreed to pay: payment fees, shipping, promotions they funded.

Two decisions cause most disputes later: whether commission is charged on the price before or after discounts, and who pays for a discount the marketplace ran. Put both in the seller agreement and show them on every statement.

A buyer with a cart from three sellers pays once. That single payment has to become three seller balances, each with its own commission, its own shipping and its own share of any cart-level discount. The buyer sees one order; your books need three.

The hard cases are partial. One seller cancels their item: refund that line, reverse only that seller's split, and leave the other two alone. A cart-wide coupon: decide in advance how it's spread across sellers (by value is common) and whether the marketplace or the sellers fund it. Write both rules down before launch, because changing them later means re-explaining every past statement.

Sellers care about two things: how soon they're paid and whether they can predict it. A weekly payout on a fixed day often beats a daily one that sometimes slips, because sellers plan their own supplier payments around it.

Whatever you choose, publish the cut-off: orders released by a certain time are in that run, later ones in the next. It turns “why wasn't this order paid?” into something sellers can answer themselves.

A marketplace is only as trustworthy as its least-checked seller. Verifying sellers before their first payout protects buyers from fraud, protects the marketplace from paying the wrong people, and protects honest sellers from competitors who cut corners.

Sellers reconcile their statements; the marketplace has to reconcile everything at once. Every rupee a buyer paid should be accounted for in exactly one place: a seller's balance, the marketplace's commission and fees, a refund, or money still held. If the four don't add up to what was collected, something was double-counted or lost.

Run it daily against the settlements you actually received, not against orders placed. The common gaps are timing (collected today, settled tomorrow), refunds processed but not yet reflected in a seller balance, and cash-on-delivery money not yet remitted.

Marketplaces that calculate payouts from order tables eventually lose track of money. The dependable approach is a ledger: every event that changes what a seller is owed (a sale released, a commission, a fee, a refund, a clawback, a payout) becomes an entry, and the seller's balance is the sum of their entries.

A ledger makes three things easy that are otherwise painful: statements that always add up, negative balances that carry forward correctly, and payout runs that can be repeated safely, because an entry that already exists is never written twice.

Most seller support tickets are the same question in different words: where is my money? A seller view that answers it before they ask is the cheapest support you'll ever build. It doesn't need to be elaborate; it needs to be complete and in the seller's language, not your ledger's.

Show money in the states the seller cares about (earned, on hold, on its way, paid) and let every amount open into the orders and deductions behind it. When a payout is smaller than expected, the explanation should be one click away, not one email away.