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A marketplace order is an order carrying products from one of your sellers. Where a shopper buys from two sellers in a single checkout, that one purchase becomes one order per seller, each fulfilled by the seller it belongs to and each carrying its own share of what was paid. The shopper experiences a single purchase. They pay once, receive one confirmation, and see their basket arriving in separate deliveries. Your team sees the separate orders, and each seller sees only their own. To review them, navigate to Orders in the admin dashboard.

How a Checkout Is Split

The Orders list, with two seller orders from one purchase A checkout is split when its goods belong to more than one party, and your own goods count as a party of their own. A basket holding one seller’s goods, or only your own, produces one ordinary order. A basket mixing your own goods with one seller’s produces two. Where it does span several, the checkout becomes a purchase holding one order per seller. The purchase keeps the number the shopper saw, and the orders number off it. A purchase numbered R1003 produces R1003-1 and R1003-2. The split is a real division rather than a presentational one. Each order carries its own items, its own delivery charge and its own totals, worked out in its own right rather than divided down from the basket.
The purchase itself is not an order and does not appear as a row in your orders list. Searching for R1003 finds R1003-1 and R1003-2, which are the orders that exist.

Finding the Other Parts of a Purchase

The Seller card on an order, with the link to the rest of the purchase The Seller column on the orders list names the seller behind each order, with an empty field if the order is one of your own. It is shown by default, because the list holds your orders and your sellers’ together. To see the rest of one purchase, open any order from it and use View all orders in this purchase on the Seller card. That filters the orders list to that purchase alone. The same link is available as a Purchase column on the list, which is hidden until you add it.

What Differs on a Seller’s Order Page

A seller's order in the admin dashboard A seller’s order is processed in the same way as any other, and Processing Orders covers the screen itself. However, there are three things are there that an ordinary order does not have:
  • Seller names the business that sold it, linked to their seller page. On an order of your own this card reads Sold by you. Where the order was part of a larger purchase, the card also says so and links to the rest.
  • Commission lists what your marketplace charged, one row per item, naming the rate that charged it, the fee and any tax on that fee. Delivery appears as its own row where the rate charges on it.
  • Seller transfers shows what the sale earned the seller once the order is fulfilled, and whether it has been settled into a payout yet.
The order summary carries both the order total and the marketplace fee, so what the shopper paid and what you charged are readable together.
Commission is charged when the order is placed, and the seller’s earning is created when the order is fulfilled. An order that has not shipped therefore shows a commission with no transfer against it yet.

Who Fulfills a Seller Order

The seller does, from their own panel. The goods are theirs, held at their own stock location, and shipped using the delivery methods they set up. Your team can still act on a seller’s order from the admin dashboard in the same way as any other, which is what you need when a seller is unresponsive or a customer escalates to you. Some marketplaces are run the other way round. Where sellers hold their stock in a warehouse the marketplace owns, your own team picks and ships every order and fulfills each seller’s orders on their behalf from the admin dashboard. Nothing about the split changes: each seller still has their own order, earns on it and is paid for it. What changes is who packs the parcel. A marketplace working this way puts its stock locations and delivery methods in its own hands rather than asking each seller to set up their own, which is covered under Onboarding.

How a Seller Fulfills an Order

A seller's orders list in their own panel Orders reach a seller under Orders in their panel, where they see only their own. The list carries the order number, when it was placed, its fulfillment and payment status and its total, and can be filtered by any of those. A seller fulfilling an order, with the tracking number and notification Opening an order shows what has to go out on the Fulfillments card, with the delivery method the shopper chose and the location it ships from.
  1. Tick the items going in this parcel, and set the quantity where only some are being sent.
  2. Enter the Tracking number.
  3. Choose the Shipping carrier, or leave it to be detected from the tracking number.
  4. Leave Send shipment notification to customer ticked to email the shopper, or clear it to ship quietly.
  5. Click Fulfill items.
The order moves to Fulfilled, or to Partial where some items are still to come, and the stock comes off the seller’s own location. Fulfilling the whole order is also what creates the seller’s earning. A seller can split a parcel into two, add a tracking number afterwards, print a packing slip or a label, and cancel a parcel to put the goods back on the shelf. Returns and claims are raised and handled from the same page. See The Seller Panel.

How the Money Divides

Take a shopper who buys one $36.00 mug from a seller and pays $6.00 to have it delivered, on a marketplace charging ten percent commission on the goods alone. That seller’s order comes to $42.00, and divides like this: Whether delivery is included in the fee depends on the rate, which can be set to charge on it or not. See Commission Rates. The seller’s earning appears as a transfer once the order is fulfilled, and earnings gather on their balance until they are settled into a payout. See Seller Transfers and Payouts.
Refunding a seller’s order writes a reversal that takes back the seller’s share of what was refunded rather than the whole amount, so a refund does not charge them commission on goods that came back. The commission on the order itself is not rewritten, because it is the record of what was charged at the time. See Seller Transfers.

Further Reading