Payout Report: Reserved, Deferred and Available

Open a payout report expecting an argument about fees and you will usually find the fees were fine. The gap is somewhere else. Part of it is a date, and part of it is a slice of your own sales sitting in a column with a name you have never had a reason to read.

Gross sales, fees, reserved funds, payable. Only the last one buys stock. All three platforms publish all four, none of them puts them on one screen, and each uses a different word for the middle two.

The fee arithmetic behind the second quantity is its own piece. What follows is the other half of the same order: which balance is real money, what pins the rest in place, and what releases it. Every figure below came off a platform's own page on 2026-08-23, and the two pages that would not open from outside an account are named at the end rather than papered over.

Three balances, and two of them cannot be spent

eBay's guide to the Payments tab defines these as transaction statuses you can filter by, and adds two more that matter while a case runs: Open, funds in dispute that may move to On hold, and Released, a hold that has lifted into Available funds. Where eBay can estimate a release date for a held transaction, it shows one.

Amazon's "How Amazon seller payments work" guide defines a deferred transaction as one that will be paid out at a future date, and says plainly that most transactions are deferred for some period before payout. The same guide describes the account level reserve as a portion of your balance held for a period of time to cover circumstances like refunds or chargebacks.

Etsy's Payment account carries Current — available sales funds after refunds, fees, taxes and anything sitting in a reserve — and Pending, which is everything not yet eligible. Reserved money lives inside Pending.

Seven days after delivery, not seven days after the sale

This is the sentence worth copying out of Amazon's payments guide: with deliveries, it says, Amazon typically reserves funds for seven days to give customers time to inspect their purchases and get refunds if needed.

Note what the clock is tied to. Not dispatch, not the order date, but the parcel arriving and the buyer having a look at it — which means the reserve on a given order cannot even start counting while that order is in a truck. Put that next to the rest of the published cycle — accounts settled in general every two weeks, then up to five business days for the transfer to appear — and the distance between selling something and spending the money is not fourteen days. It is fourteen plus however long the parcel took plus seven plus the bank. A slow carrier does not merely annoy a buyer. It moves your money.

Etsy's reserve works off the same trigger from the other end of the trip. Etsy's "What is a Payment Account Reserve?" help article says a percentage of each new sale of a physical item is held, and released either when the seller adds tracking and Etsy can verify the order is in transit, or, if no tracking is provided, once a default holding period has passed. Digital sales are never reserved. Released funds become available at 6pm ET on the day they come out.

eBay describes a transaction hold as waiting for confirmation that the item reached the buyer, against a baseline where proceeds are typically available within two business days of the buyer's payment being confirmed.

Three companies, three vocabularies, one release condition: a carrier scan the platform can read. That is a quieter argument for uploading tracking the same day than any performance metric makes.

The named holds, with their published lengths

eBay is the only one of the three that prints durations, and its "Payments on hold" seller guidance separates them cleanly. A hold is usually resolved within 30 days. Beyond that baseline:

• New or infrequent sellers. eBay holds the funds while it confirms the item was successfully delivered, and says that in limited circumstances a new seller may see holds of up to 21 days.
• Sellers whose restriction or suspension was recently lifted: transaction holds for the 30 days afterwards.
• High-priced items or unusual selling patterns: up to 30 days.
• Authenticity Guarantee items: up to 30 days, until authenticity is confirmed.
• Payment dispute or Money Back Guarantee holds. These do not run on a clock at all. eBay holds the money until the case is resolved and closed, because it may be used to refund the buyer for that same transaction.

That last line is where a payout report and a case file turn out to be the same document. A card dispute on a $58 order can freeze the proceeds of that order, add eBay's flat $20.00 dispute fee if you are found responsible, and do both weeks after you counted the sale as done — which is the practical reason the card route and the platform route need separate calendars.

Then there are holds attached to no single order at all. eBay lists four: registration, compliance, performance, and an invalid payment method it cannot charge your fees to. Performance is the category sellers tend to experience as arbitrary, and eBay does put a definition on it: unusual activity associated with the account, such as increased customer claims, a sudden change in selling activity, late deliveries, or negative buyer feedback.

Etsy's reserve triggers read almost identically: a first sale, a sudden sharp increase in orders or refunds, orders consistently missing tracking information or tracking events, orders not shipped on time. Etsy Support will not tell you which one applied to you. It does say that for most sellers the reserve is removed within 90 days, and that it may be extended if fulfilment or policy problems show up in the meantime.

The Amazon file names its own columns, and its own dates

Amazon's Seller Central help pages for reserves need a login; they returned a sign-in screen from outside an account on 2026-08-23, so the reserve setting applied to your own account is only readable in there.

What is public is the file format, in Amazon's Selling Partner API "Settlement Reports" documentation, and two things in it change how you reconcile. Settlement reports cannot be requested or scheduled — Amazon generates them automatically, so the report period is Amazon's boundary and not your bookkeeping month. And the current flat file collapses every price into three general-purpose columns, amount-type, amount-description and amount, sitting alongside transaction-type, settlement-id, deposit-date, posted-date, order-id and sku. Amazon's stated reason for that shape is durability: every figure lands in the one amount column, so a new fee or transaction type arriving next year does not move a number into a column your import script has never seen. The cost of that promise is that the file no longer tells you what a row is until you read amount-type and amount-description together, which is why these files are usually only legible as a pivot table.

Read that way, the file stops hiding one thing in particular. A refund, a fee adjustment and a SAFE-T reimbursement are separate rows with their own posted dates, and they routinely land in a later settlement than the sale they belong to. Nothing in the file joins them up for you.

eBay hands you four files answering four different questions

From the Reports section of the Payments tab, documented on eBay's "How to use the Payments tab in Seller Hub" page, the Financial overview splits into CSVs that are easy to confuse: Orders is proceeds before transaction fees, Refunds covers returns, cases, cancellations, requests and disputes but excludes fee credits, Expenses is fees, fee credits and what you paid for shipping labels, and Net transfers is payouts sent to you plus amounts collected from you.

The financial documents are the transaction report (CSV, carrying transaction date, order number, buyer name, payout date and fees), the financial statement (PDF, monthly) and the tax invoice. Statements are now generated on the 1st for the calendar month just ended, while older ones stayed on the mid-month cycle — an unpleasant surprise if you reconcile a full year backwards.

Run the $58.00 order from the fee piece through this side of the ledger. The buyer pays $72.60, of which $4.75 is sales tax eBay collects and remits, so the largest amount that could ever be yours is $67.85. The final value fee is $10.27, leaving $57.58 of proceeds. Buy the label through eBay at, say, $9.20 and it lands in Expenses rather than in any fee column, so the payable figure is $48.38 against an item you priced at $58.00. Nothing unexpected was taken. But three of those four numbers live in three different files.

The join key is the payout ID. Selecting it opens the per-transaction breakdown of what went into that specific deposit, which is the only view that answers the question you actually have when a bank line looks wrong.

Etsy makes you do the subtraction, then explains why it will not match

Etsy's instructions for calculating your own deposit are refreshingly manual. Download the monthly statement CSV, sum the Fee and Tax amounts from the most recent deposit forward, sum the sales that are available for deposit while skipping any whose Info column shows a future availability date, and subtract one from the other.

The same CSV is where reserved money becomes visible: a Status column showing whether a sale is in the reserve, and an Availability Date column giving the estimated date that portion frees up. In the Orders view, those orders carry an "Order in reserve" badge.

Etsy also publishes, in advance, why its own two numbers disagree. Net profit in the Activity summary covers total sales, fees, marketing and shipping over a chosen period; the deposit is whatever was available at the moment the transfer ran. They will not reconcile to the penny.

The rest of Etsy's timing belongs on an index card. New shops: funds generally eligible for deposit 14 days after a sale, sent weekly on Mondays by default. Established shops: potentially the next business day. Daily deposits require a minimum balance, USD 25.00 on a US bank account. Change your bank details and a 5-day hold applies to the funds in your Payment account. Instant transfers, still a limited US beta, cost 1% with a 25 cent minimum and a $1 maximum, cap at $500 a day, and allow one request per 24 hours.

What this is for

Knowing you made $2,000 last month is bookkeeping. Knowing which day that $2,000 becomes spendable decides whether you can restock before the next payout, and the two answers can be three weeks apart.

So take the most recent payout on whichever platform you sell on most, pick one order inside it, and write two dates beside that order: the day the money became payable, and the day it reached your bank. Then do the same for an order that had a case opened against it. The distance between those two pairs is your real working capital cycle.

Reserve and payout policies move less often than the deadlines that shifted twice in 2026 elsewhere on this site, so this one goes back on the calendar at 180 days — next check due around 2027-02-19.

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Read on 2026-08-23: Amazon's "How Amazon seller payments work" and "Get paid faster with Express Payout" pages on sell.amazon.com; Amazon's Selling Partner API "Settlement Reports" documentation at developer-docs.amazon.com; eBay's "How to use the Payments tab in Seller Hub" and "Payments on hold" seller guidance, plus eBay's "Getting paid for items you've sold" help page (id=4814); and Etsy's help articles What is a Payment Account Reserve?, How to Receive Your Etsy Payments Deposit, How to Calculate Your Etsy Payments Deposit Amount, How to Manage Your Payment Account and Why Hasn't My Money Been Deposited Yet?.

Not verified at source: Amazon's Seller Central reserve pages, which return a login screen from outside an account, so both the reserve setting on a given account and the schedule on which Amazon moved sellers onto a delivery-date-based reserve have to be read inside Seller Central. The widely quoted Etsy figure of "up to 45 days" for a reserve holding period traces to Etsy's Seller Handbook, which returned a bot-protection page; the help article that did open gives no fixed number and says the holding time and percentage are displayed in your own Payment account.