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How long payout will be reviewed? I request it about 10 days ago.
Support doesn't reply
How long payout will be reviewed? I request it about 10 days ago.
Support doesn't reply
Hello, Sorry for not getting back sooner. A few of our support tickets didn't get responded to, I'm sorry about that. We're delayed some payouts because we're making some changes to how we handle tax information verification. These changes should be out this week. We went through all the tickets and got back to those who we missed, if you didn't get a response please send another email.
Thanks
I read your new changes but I'm not happy about it. Other companies have regular schedules - they pay what's due on the 1st of the 15th of the month automatically - people don't have to request payouts.
You're now forcing us to request a payout on very small amounts so that we don't forfeit it; and your payout fees are very high compared to other companies.
Smashwords for example pays out automatically via PayPal every amount in excess of 1c. They have a fixed commission but they charge no fee for paying via PayPal. Another company I sell through pays twice a month and their payment fee is $0.30. But every company I sell though outside of itch.io have an automated system - if your reach their minimum then you're automatically paid at the end of the month.
Can you please consider an automated system where you automatically pay what is due once a month or once every 3 months or on reaching a minimum thresh hold instead of implementing a system of fees and forfeits?
Thanks for the feedback. We have had the manual payout system to help us prevent fraudulent sellers by giving us time to review a payout after a claim is made. Now that we have more strict up-front identity verification then it may no longer be necessary for this additional time. We may switch over to an automated schedule. In the meantime, we give sellers 1 year to claim their earnings.
You mentioned the other company using another service to pay with a fee of 30 cents, what service are they using? (Also I wasn't aware PayPal lets you send 1 cent transactions)
Paypal has different fees depending on whether it's bulk payments or not.
The 30cents I mentioned was the company's fee - it could also be an admin fee that they charge and that they're absorbing the rest of the fee in their commission structure. They are using PayPal.
Humble Store charges s a 2% fee, up to $1 maximum per payment, when using PayPal.
In contrast your Payout fees are 19.5%
Smashwords did for ebooks what you've done for games - only a few steps further as they also distribute them to major stores - I've received small payments from them - but how the 1c minimum works I don't know. However, they also have a minimum purchase amount of 99cents - so after commission they probably never have a balance go less than 60 cents. But any fees are absorbed in their commission so it has to be quite low.
https://www.smashwords.com/about/supportfaq#Royalties
$1.99 book price
$0.59 retailer commission (Apple Store)
$0.19 Smashwords commission
$1.21 what I got paid - from Smashwords via PayPal.
This is what the summary says:
Sales 14.24
Payment Provider Fee * 2.92 (20.51%)
Itch.io cut 2.84 (20%)
Owed to you: $ 8.48 (59.55%)
*There is a discrepancy between your summary and the detail list - they show different values for the payment provider fee.
The detail list shows:
Sales 14.24
Payment Provider Fee* 2.76 (19.38%)
Itch.io cut 2.84 (20%)
Owed to you: $8.64 (60.67%)
Initially I wasn't requesting payouts because I thought on a higher amount that % cost of Payment provider fee would be less - but then you started deducting it per sale and so it didn't matter whether you requested a payment on a large or small amount - you'd be losing that % regardless.
PayPal isn't going to charge you $2.92 or even $2.76 to pay me $8.48 I therefore assume there is a fee built into that.
In fact they charge 4 - 6% depending on the value of the transaction. On a 10 euro payment I received from a client the PayPal fee was 0.74 Euro. This is ad-hoc single business transactions. Once you're doing bulk payments that fee is dramatically reduced.
The transaction fee always exists regardless of how the money is paid out to your account. We don't charge any money to transfer money to your PayPal account (aka a Payout). All online marketplaces have some sort of transaction fee, so saying we have a 30% payout fee compared to others isn't correct. We have a per transaction fee from the payment processor, but no payout fee.
Transactions fees from payment processors are comprised of a fixed amount (generally 30 cents) + percent amount (generally 2.9%). This means it's to your advantage to charge more for your product. If you sell a 1 dollar product then the 30 cent fixed fee is going to account for 30% (which is huge). If you charge 2 dollars, then the fixed fee is now 15% of it.
Thank you for the explanation. I assumed that the fee was for paying me the money, but in fact it’s for receiving the money from the buyer. I’ve never dealt with that side of it as it’s always covered by the fixed commission that I pay at other stores.
So, as I understand it, if someone buys my game for $1.00 using PayPal then there’s a fee of 32cents from PayPal on that and you’re deducting that from my account and giving me 68cents. (PayPal has a new API where that fee would be 25cents). Thereafter You would deduct whatever commission I gave you and the rest is mine without any fees. For a $1.00 receipt I’d get 48 cents (using 20% commission.) And you would transfer the 48 cents to me without any additional fee.
I did see that Paypal has a fee for micropayments that are less than $10 which works out to 5% + 5c but I don’t know if these are available to businesses.
Queries:
The Payment provider fee in my summary is 16c more than the payment provider fee in the transactions. (They should agree.)
I had completed the tax interview and got to a final page that said this is now complete you can press a button or close your browser – I did this on the day I received the email introducing this procedure. In my account it is not showing that I completed it – it’s showing the option to do the tax interview. Does this mean I'll have to redo it? And can you then double-check that it is saving them once complete - with Firefox browser?
Thank you.
I refilled the tax interview - it triggered this time.
I also checked the calculations and saw that actually neither of the 2 calculations are correct - the actual payout should be $8.58 - I could figure out that the $8.64 was rounding down the decimals instead of just rounding them and that accounts for the discrepancy there - but the other calculation I differ from 1c to 4c on each total. If that's an internal calculation then that's okay, you'll score the 10c, but if that is being given to you by the payment provider, well then they're doing something funny.
The payment provider fees can vary slightly. We avoid doing the calculation on our server, but instead have them tell us the exact amount they charged. Sometimes this value is pulled asynchronously though, so we show an estimated amount with the formula. This may cause your final payout to change by a small amount before it is finally paid. We never release funds with the estimated amount though, so the amount paid is the final amount.