Seller balance in MultiMerch

In the default MultiMerch payment flow, customers purchase products from sellers making payments to the marketplace, which then distributes them to sellers in payouts.

MultiMerch uses the concept of seller balance to keep track of the money owed to the seller by the marketplace – this information is stored in the database as transactions.

This guide covers seller balance and transactions in detail.

Seller balance and transactions – the basics

When a new order is placed by the customer, MultiMerch creates a transaction record in the database which credits seller's balance for the amount equaling order total minus marketplace commission.

Later, seller balance statements are used by MultiMerch to generate correct payout amounts when you're ready to pay your sellers.

When a payout is completed, MultiMerch creates a transaction debiting seller's balance for the total payout amount.

Seller balance and transaction system lets you and your marketplace staff keep track of all payments due to your sellers.

Balance management and reporting for sellers

MultiMerch provides sellers with information about their balances in a few different areas in their accounts.

Dashboard is the first one – in addition to other sales data, seller's dashboard in MultiMerch will always display the current balance of the seller.

Sellers can also view a detailed history of their transactions in the Finances section of their accounts.

Here, MultiMerch will display all of seller's transactions and provide sellers with a few sorting and filtering options.

Credit (positive) transactions are generated by sales while debit (negative) transactions indicate payouts.

In addition to the main list of transactions, sellers have access to two reports – transaction report and payout report.

These let sellers generate transaction reports for specific date ranges as well as view the history of past payouts.

Finally, MultiMerch will also display transactions generated by a specific order in the order details page.

This lets the seller see whether a transaction has already been generated for each specific order.

 

Transaction and balance management by the marketplace administration

MultiMerch offers marketplace owners a number of handy tools to manage seller transactions and balances.

Transaction history is the most basic one – it is a list of all marketplace transactions for all sellers that can be accessed via Admin > MultiMerch > Finances > Transactions.

This list displays all incoming and outgoing transactions to and from all seller balances and can be sorted and filtered by seller accounts, amounts, dates and descriptions.

In addition to the list, MultiMerch offers marketplace owners three different reports to help manage seller balances – Transactions, Seller finances and Payouts.

All of these can be found via Admin > MultiMerch > Reports > Finances > Transactions.

The Transactions report is similar to the list of transactions, but also makes it possible to display transactions for a specific date range only.

The Seller finances report, on the other hand, provides marketplace staff with a complete overview of all seller balances – incoming and outgoing totals, marketplace and seller earnings as well as payments received, payouts paid and the current seller balance.

Finally, the Payouts report lists all payouts to sellers made by the marketplace to date or in a specific date range.

Just like for sellers, MultiMerch will also display all transactions generated by a specific order in the order details page.

Since a single order may contain products from different sellers, your marketplace staff will see all transactions to all sellers in individual seller tabs.

Configuring automatic transaction generation

MultiMerch will automatically create order-related transactions depending on each order's status.

You can configure this behavior by changing the Balance credit and Balance refund order status settings in Admin > MultiMerch > Settings > Orders.

This setting lets you specify which order and seller order statuses should generate positive and negative transactions to seller balances.

For example, you may decide that as soon as the order is paid by the customers all seller balances should be credited – in this case, you'll choose the Complete order status as the Balance credit status.

Alternatively, you may only want to credit seller balances when each seller has dispatched their products – then, you would choose the Dispatched seller order status as the Balance credit status.

Creating transactions manually

Sometimes, you may need a way to create a transaction manually – for example, to make an adjustment to seller's balance or to account for a manual payment that was made off site.

MultiMerch makes it possible to create manual transaction records to and from individual seller accounts via Admin > MultiMerch > Transactions > Create new transaction page.

Here, your staff can choose to create a new transaction to or from a specific seller by selecting None in the from or To field.