How you get paid, holds, and disputes

Buyers pay Why Stationery at checkout. We hold the money, then transfer your share to your own Stripe account. This guide covers when that transfer happens, what can hold it up, and what a chargeback means for you.

Everything here is the platform's standing policy. Nothing in it changes per shop.

Where your money actually sits

Why Stationery is the merchant of record. A buyer's card is charged by us, not by you, and the funds land in the platform's Stripe account first.

Your share is then sent to your own Stripe account — the one you connect in Settings. We never see or store your bank details; Stripe holds them. That's also why connecting an account is required before your listings can be published: an order that can't be paid out is an order nobody should be able to place.

You can open your Stripe dashboard any time from Settings → Payments → Manage payouts at Stripe. Balances, payout history and your bank details live there, and it's always the truth about your money — our pages describe policy, Stripe describes your balance.

When a transfer releases

Your share transfers when the order ships. Not when it's paid, and not when it's accepted.

That's deliberate, and it's a compromise. Holding funds longer would protect the platform against a buyer dispute; releasing them at checkout would expose us to orders that never ship. Releasing on shipment means you front your materials but get paid as soon as the parcel is genuinely on its way.

What you receive is the order total less the platform commission and payment processing. Those numbers are in What a wholesale order costs.

Once released, the money moves on Stripe's own payout schedule to your bank. That timing is Stripe's, not ours, and you can see it in your Stripe dashboard.

What a negative balance is

A negative balance means your shop owes the platform money. It usually arises one of three ways:

• A refund issued after your share was already transferred.
• A chargeback the platform lost, on an order you'd been paid for.
• Fees accrued with no incoming orders to net them against.

The important thing to understand: because we're the merchant of record, the platform absorbs the loss at the moment it happens. Recovering it from you afterwards is a separate step, and that's what the ladder below describes.

The ladder

If your shop carries a balance, this is what happens and when. Days count from the balance appearing.

Day	What happens	Can you still sell?
0	Payouts are held. You're notified with the amount and the cause. New orders proceed, and their proceeds net against the balance.	Yes — and you must keep fulfilling
15	Second notice. Publishing new listings is blocked; your existing listings stay live so the balance can be worked off. If you have a card on file, we charge it here.	Existing listings only
30	Your shop shows as temporarily closed. No new orders, no new listings. You keep full ability to fulfil open orders, add tracking, refund, and settle.	No
60	Referred to collections.	No

Three things about that table are worth stating plainly.

If your card refuses, the clock is shorter. Where you have a card on file and the charge is refused, your shop shows as temporarily closed 7 days later rather than at day 30 — and we try the card at least once more before that. A charge that fails for some other reason — an expired card, a step-up your bank asks for, a processing hiccup — isn't a refusal and doesn't start that clock. You'll see the date on your Payments page before it arrives, and saving a working card or settling stops it.

Selling is how you clear it. We don't freeze your shop the moment you owe something. Your next orders net against the balance, which is the fastest honest route back to zero for most shops.

Fulfilment survives suspension. Every order already placed is still owed to the buyer. A suspended shop keeps every tool needed to ship, track and refund.

Cancelling does not. While a shop is suspended it can't cancel open orders — cancelling is walking away from an order, where shipping and refunding are how you honour one. If you truly can't deliver something, refund it; that stays available throughout.

Curing resets you immediately, including reversing a block on publishing. There's no penalty period after you've settled.

The boundaries

Balances under $25 don't start a clock. They simply net against future payouts. Suspending a shop over a few dollars costs everyone more than the debt.

You get one appeal, and it pauses the clock for 7 days. If you think a balance is wrong, say so before it escalates.

Clear fraud skips the ladder. The ladder exists for honest shops in trouble, not as a runway for draining the platform.

We can act faster when risk demands it. The ladder is the default, not a guarantee — the same position Etsy and eBay take.

Chargebacks and disputes

A chargeback is a buyer asking their card issuer to reverse a payment. The issuer decides, not us and not you.

An open dispute is not a negative balance. We hold the disputed amount while the issuer reviews it — that can take up to 90 days — but the escalation clock above only starts if the dispute is lost. Sellers win disputes regularly, and penalising you mid-review would punish you for a buyer exercising a right.

In practice that means your share of a disputed order stays with us until the issuer decides: shipping it does not release the money the way it normally would, and the order will say so. The moment the dispute closes the hold lifts — including when you win, with no further wait. If 90 days pass and the issuer still has not decided, the hold lifts anyway and we carry the risk from there.

If a dispute is lost, the amount becomes a balance and the ladder begins from day 0.

The most useful thing you can do about chargebacks is make them hard to win: ship within your stated handling window, add tracking to every order, describe your listings accurately, and answer buyer messages in the order thread where there's a record. Most disputes that succeed are about goods that never arrived or arrived differently than described.

Holds that aren't about money you owe

A payout can also be held for reasons unconnected to a balance — an incomplete Stripe account, unverified identity or tax details, or a risk signal such as a sudden spike in claims. Stripe will tell you what it needs; the status on your Settings → Payments card reflects it, and Manage payouts at Stripe is where you resolve it.

If something looks wrong

Contact us before it escalates. We'd rather correct a mistaken balance on day 2 than argue about it on day 40. Balance questions, payout timing, and disputes all come to us — not to Stripe's support, who can't see the platform side of your account.