Ask most people selling online what they made on a particular sale and you will get a pause. Not because they are careless — because the answer is scattered across a commission, a payment charge, a tax on the commission, a delivery cost and a discount somebody ran last month.
We would rather the answer were on the screen.
The commission, and the tax on it
Metzee takes a percentage of each sale. On top of that percentage sits GST, because the commission is a service we sell to the seller and that service is taxable like any other.
The important word is on top. The GST is not quietly inside the commission making it look smaller. Both appear as separate lines on the monthly invoice, which is what makes the invoice usable for a return rather than just a receipt.
We are not printing the rate here. It is a setting rather than a constant — it can differ per store, and a number written into a blog post is a number that goes stale and then misleads somebody. It is on your own fee screen, where it is current.
Everything else that comes off
Promotions, delivery the store absorbed, cash collected on delivery — these are deductions too, and they come off the balance rather than being hidden inside the sale price. The sum of what was taken is a figure you can read, not one you reconstruct.
Why the money arrives later
A buyer's payment is held until the item reaches them. That means a payout is not instant, and we would rather say so plainly than dress it up.
What a seller gets in exchange is the thing that is otherwise very hard to buy: a stranger willing to take a risk on an unknown shop. The hold is what makes a first sale possible for somebody with no reviews.
The part we have not finished
Payouts in stages, for work that is made to order over weeks, are specified and not yet built. When they are, there will be a post about it here rather than a line in a changelog nobody reads.
If you make things, this is where to start. If you want to know what the other side of the transaction looks like, read why we hold the money.