Your first payout, step by step

The Request payout button sits at the end of a queue. Before it does anything, a sale has to happen, the order has to finish, a clock has to run out, and a bank account has to pass a review. Miss one of those and the button is either greyed out or asking you for something. So here is the whole chain in order, with the screen that shows each step.

Two things to sort out before your first sale

Payouts are gated on a verified email address. Not a soft nudge in a settings screen: the request is refused at the server if the address on the account has never been confirmed. Do that early, because finding out on the day you want money is the worst possible time.

The second thing is a bank account, and this one takes longer than people expect. Submitting your details does not switch payouts on. It starts a review, and the Payouts screen tells you where you are the whole time. With no account, the button reads “Add a bank to request payouts”. While your details are being checked it reads “Bank under review”. If something was wrong it reads “Fix bank details”, and the reason comes back with it, so you are correcting a specific field rather than guessing which one upset the reviewer.

One detail worth knowing: you get two minutes to withdraw a submission that is still in review. After that it goes to whoever is checking it and you wait for the outcome. That window is short on purpose, and it protects the reviewer rather than rationing you. An account that has already been approved or declined can be removed whenever you like, as often as you like, so a typo is never permanent.

A sale is not earnings yet

Only completed orders earn. An order that has been paid but not fulfilled shows on the Payouts screen as “Available soon”, and it is deliberately excluded from every balance total. Real sale, real money, wrong stage.

This is the part sellers argue with, and I understand why. The card cleared, the buyer is happy, the money is visibly somewhere. But an unfinished order can still be cancelled or refunded, and counting it now would only mean uncounting it later. Better to show it in its own line and let you plan around it than to inflate a number you might have to hand back.

What lands in that line is your net, not the order total. Sello starts from the product lines, takes off the platform fee, and on dropship lines takes off what the supplier was paid. Shipping, the processing fee and tax collected at checkout were never yours, so they never appear.

The clearing window

When an order completes, its earnings go into clearing for a set number of days. The number is shown in the app rather than buried in a policy page, and the Wallet spells it out per entry, with a line telling you the date it clears and how long the hold is. During that window the money is yours and visible, and you cannot withdraw it.

Running alongside that is the rolling reserve, a percentage of your sales held back to cover refunds and chargebacks. Each held amount is released automatically once its hold period passes, so nobody has to remember to give it back. It gets its own line on the Payouts screen, labelled with the exact percentage, and tapping it opens an explanation. That makes the available figure look smaller than your sales, which is the point of showing it separately.

Why available is lower than you expected

Available is what is left after several things come out of cleared earnings. The reserve, obviously. Any payout already in flight, since that money is spoken for. Open chargebacks and their fees. Refund fees on orders you have refunded. If support has ever credited or debited your account by hand, that lands here too.

None of it is hidden. Every one of those movements has a line in the Wallet with a date and a note, which is the fastest way to answer why a number is not what you thought. The ledger is rebuilt from the underlying orders, refunds, chargebacks and payouts every time you open it, so it cannot quietly drift away from reality the way a running total can.

Requesting the money

There is a minimum request amount and there may be a fee. Both are shown before you confirm, next to an estimated arrival, so the amount that leaves and the amount that lands are visible in the same place. Ask for more than you have available and the request is refused rather than queued. Sit below the minimum and the option is simply not there yet.

Once it goes through, the request carries a status. It starts at Requested, can move to Confirmed, and ends at Paid. You also get an email when it is sent. If a request is denied, the amount goes straight back into your available balance and you get an email saying so, so a rejected payout costs you time and nothing else.

Everything settles in EUR

Balances and payouts are exact in EUR. Set the app to another currency and the Payouts screen keeps showing you the EUR figures, with your currency alongside as an estimate. It reads oddly at first if you think in kronor or pounds. The alternative is a converted number that will not match what your bank receives, and on the one screen where the number has to be true, an estimate is worse than an awkward one.