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Marketplace settings are the rules that apply to every seller on your marketplace. They decide how sellers are paid, whether an admin needs to review sellers before they can trade, what files sellers may attach to their products, whether sellers receive emails from your store, and what tax is charged on your commission. These settings are the defaults for the whole marketplace. An individual seller can carry their own payout schedule and their own minimum payout, set on that seller’s page, and those will override the settings here for that seller alone. To manage them, navigate to Settings → Marketplace in the admin dashboard.
The page holds one Save for everything on it, rather than one per section. Changing any field brings up Discard beside it, which returns every field to the values it was last saved with.

Payouts

The Payouts section, with the provider, schedule and minimum payout How and when the marketplace pays its sellers.
  • Paid through - Who moves the money. Your own books means you send each payout yourself and record it as paid in the dashboard. Stripe Connect means the provider pays sellers, and each seller has to set up their own account with it before they can be paid.
  • Settle sellers - How often earnings are gathered into a payment: daily, weekly, every two weeks, monthly, or only when you say so. The default is monthly.
  • Minimum payout - The smallest balance worth sending. A seller owed less than this carries their balance into the next period instead. Zero pays whatever is owed.
Your own books suits a marketplace with only a handful of sellers that you already pay by bank transfer, where you would rather keep the payments in your own accounting system than add a provider. It costs nothing per transfer, and the trade-off is that somebody has to make each payment manually and record it. Stripe Connect is more suitable for marketplaces with large numbers of sellers, where paying them all manually would be too time-consuming and costly. The settlement schedule is a choice between the seller’s cash flow and your own effort. Daily or Weekly suits a marketplace whose sellers are small businesses depending on the money arriving, particularly where you pay through a provider and each payment costs you nothing to make. Monthly suits fewer, larger payments and less reconciliation. Only when you say so suits a new marketplace where you want to look at every settlement before it goes out, or when a dedicated finance team pays on its own cycle. The minimum payout exists to avoid paying unnecessary transfer fees on lots of small payments. A balance below it rolls forward to the next period instead, so a seller is paid once the amount is worth sending. Leave it at zero where transfers cost you nothing.
Both the schedule and the minimum are defaults for the marketplace. An individual seller can carry their own, set on that seller’s page, which suits a large seller you have agreed different terms with.
Stripe Connect is offered only once your store already has Stripe set up as a payment method, because the account that charges your customers is the one that pays your sellers. Each seller then connects their own account as part of their checklist, and a seller without one cannot be paid. See Payments.

Seller Admission

The Seller admission section, with both review switches Whether a person reviews a seller, or a seller’s product, before either goes live.
  • Approve sellers automatically - A seller starts trading the moment they finish their checklist, with nobody reviewing them.
  • Publish seller products automatically - A seller’s product goes on sale the moment they submit it, with nobody reviewing it.
Both switches are usually left off, which is what makes your seller requirements checklist a real gate rather than a formality. With both of them switched off, a seller finishing the checklist waits for your review, and each product they submit needs your approval before being published. Turning Approve sellers automatically on suits an invite-only marketplace, where you have already decided who each seller is before sending the invitation and the checklist is there to collect their details rather than to vet them. It makes less sense where anyone can apply, because the checklist is then the only thing standing between an applicant and your storefront. Turning Publish seller products automatically on suits established sellers listing a high volume of products, where reviewing each one would be a significant bottleneck. The risk is different from the one above: an unreviewed seller can be suspended before they sell anything, while an unreviewed product is on your storefront under your name the moment it is submitted.
Each switch removes a human decision. A workable middle setting on a growing marketplace is to review sellers but not their products, so you still choose who trades while a seller you have already approved can list freely.

Seller Files

The Seller files section Whether sellers may attach downloadable files to their own products, which kinds of file those may be, and whether changing one on a product already on sale needs looking at again.
  • Let sellers upload digital files - Off by default. Switched on, sellers attach downloadable files to their own products and set the download limits on them. Left off, only your own team adds files, and a seller sees the ones you added without being able to change them.
  • Accepted file types for sellers - Which formats a seller may upload. Pick from the list, or type a content type such as application/pdf and press Enter to add one that is not there. A whole family is accepted as well, written as audio/*.
  • Review file changes on products already on sale - On by default. A seller who adds or replaces a file on an approved product sends that product back to review and off sale until you approve it again.
Uploading is off to begin with because a file a shopper downloads carries your marketplace’s name, which makes it something your marketplace vouches for in the same way a listing is. A marketplace selling digital goods through its sellers switches it on; one where the files are your own leaves it off. The accepted types are checked against each file’s own signature rather than its name, so renaming a file does not get it past the list. The list starts with the usual document, archive, audio, video and image formats. Your own uploads are never restricted by it.
Review file changes on products already on sale does nothing where Publish seller products automatically is switched on, because there is no review step for a product to go back to. A marketplace that reviews nothing accepts the file along with everything else.

Communication

The Communication section, with the seller email switch Whether your store sends sellers its own emails about approval, products and payouts. Emails to customers are not affected either way. It is on by default, and most marketplaces leave it on, because it is what tells a seller their invitation is waiting or their application has been approved without anyone writing to them. Turning it off might suit a few specific situations:
  • A marketplace with few enough sellers that you write to each one personally, where the store’s own wording would read as impersonal beside yours.
  • A marketplace running seller communication through its own mailing or support system, where two sets of emails about the same event would confuse people.
  • A store being set up or migrated, where real sellers exist in the data and nobody wants them to receive anything until the marketplace is ready.
With this off, nothing tells a seller they have been approved, suspended or rejected. Invitations are the exception and are still sent, because without one nobody can reach the panel at all.

Commission Tax

The Commission tax section The tax charged on your commission, as a percentage, used when neither the commission rate itself nor your tax provider supplies a rate. Leave it at zero if you charge no tax on your fee. Your commission is a fee on the service you provide to the seller, which is a separate thing from the goods the seller sells to the shopper. Where that service is taxable, the tax on it is worked out on its own and never mixes with the tax the customer paid on the item. This matters most to marketplaces operating where VAT applies to a commission charged between businesses, which covers the EU and other VAT jurisdictions. A marketplace whose fee is not taxable leaves the figure at zero and nothing is charged on it.
Commission tax is worked out against the seller’s own jurisdiction rather than the shopper’s, because the service is sold to the seller. A marketplace with sellers in several countries is therefore likely to need a figure per rate rather than one default. See Commission Rates.
This figure is a fallback. A commission rate carrying its own tax figure uses that instead for the sales it charges, and where a tax provider is configured, it answers before this default is reached.
Whether your commission is taxable, and at what rate, depends on where you and your sellers are based. Always confirm the correct rates with your accountant before entering a figure here.

Further Reading