Do the fee math on what you sold this week and subtract it from the total, and the number you land on almost never matches what actually shows up in your bank account. Sellers usually blame a payout hold — a real thing, worth understanding on its own — but a held payout eventually clears at exactly the expected amount. This is a different problem: even a payout with nothing on hold routinely comes in short of what a same-day sales log implies, because a payout isn't a receipt for one sale. It's a snapshot of a shared pool of funds, and plenty else is drawing from that pool besides the orders you're trying to match it to.
Three numbers, and none of them is your bank deposit
Open Seller Hub's Payments tab and eBay is actually tracking several distinct figures for the same activity, and conflating them is where the reconciliation breaks down:
- Order earnings — one order's sale price minus that specific order's
- own final value fee and per-order fee. This is the per-transaction profit
- number, visible on that order's own details page.
- Available funds — the running pool of money eBay has collected on your
- behalf, net of everything already deducted, that hasn't been sent to your
- bank yet.
- Payout — an actual disbursement out of that pool to your bank account,
- on whatever schedule (daily, or a chosen day each week) you've set in your
- Payments preferences.
Order earnings is a per-sale number. A payout is a per-pool number. A payout is not "today's order earnings, deposited" — it's whatever the available-funds pool happens to hold at the moment eBay triggers a disbursement, and that pool has things pulled out of it besides the orders you sold that day.
What else pulls from the same pool
Final value fees and the per-order fee are the two deductions every seller expects — 13.6% of the order total up to $7,500 and 2.35% on the portion above that, plus a $0.30 or $0.40 per-order fee depending on whether the order clears $10. Those come out of the specific order's earnings, which is why the Earnings report's per-order math is reliable. What catches sellers off guard is everything else that comes out of the pool, not out of one specific order:
- Shipping labels bought through eBay. Buy a label for an order and eBay
- charges it against your available funds immediately — a debit against the
- same pool your next payout draws from, not against that order's earnings
- line specifically.
- Promoted Listings ad fees. These accrue against the pool as your
- promoted listings convert to sales, at whatever ad rate you've set — a
- separate cost from the final value fee, on its own running total.
- Store subscription renewals. A monthly or annual Store fee gets
- charged against the same funds, on its own billing date, unrelated to any
- single sale that day.
- Refunds and disputes. A refund on an order from weeks ago draws from
- today's available funds today, even though the sale it's refunding closed
- out long before.
None of this is a hold. eBay isn't sitting on the money to manage risk — it is netting several unrelated charges against one account balance before it sends anything to your bank, the same way a checking account balance reflects every transaction that's cleared against it, not just the one deposit you happen to be looking at.
A worked example
Say you sell three items in one day:
- Order A: $40 item, $6 buyer-paid shipping, $46 total. Final value fee:
- 13.6% × $46 = $6.26. Per-order fee (over $10): $0.40. Order earnings:
- $46.00 − $6.66 = $39.34.
- Order B: $8 item, $4 shipping, $12 total. Final value fee: 13.6% ×
- $12 = $1.63. Per-order fee (over $10): $0.40. Order earnings: $12.00 −
- $2.03 = $9.97.
- Order C: $6 item, $3 shipping, $9 total. Final value fee: 13.6% × $9 =
- $1.22. Per-order fee (at or under $10): $0.30. Order earnings: $9.00 −
- $1.52 = $7.48.
Sold that day: $67. Combined order earnings: $39.34 + $9.97 + $7.48 = $56.79. That's the number a straightforward "sales minus fees" log would predict for the day's payout.
The same day, three other things also drew from the available-funds pool: two eBay-bought shipping labels for orders that sold earlier in the week ($4.85 and $3.65, $8.50 total), $3.10 in accrued Promoted Listings fees, and a $27.99 Store subscription renewal that happened to bill that day. None of those relate to Orders A, B, or C.
Actual payout: $56.79 − $8.50 − $3.10 − $27.99 = $17.20.
Nothing is wrong. Nothing is held. The seller sold $67, correctly logged $56.79 in order earnings, and still watched $17.20 hit the bank — a $39.59 gap that has nothing to do with that day's three sales and everything to do with what else pulled from the same pool.
Two reports, and which one answers which question
eBay gives you the tools to reconcile this exactly, but only if you pull the right report for the right question:
- Earnings report (Seller Hub → Payments → Reports) — a per-order
- breakdown after that order's own fees and refunds. This is your P&L input:
- real profit per item, the number cost-basis tracking should be built on.
- Payout detail — click any individual payout in the Payments tab and
- eBay lists exactly what's netted into that one deposit: orders, label
- charges, ad fees, subscription renewals, refunds. This number is
- guaranteed to match your bank deposit, because it's the same list, not a
- derived estimate.
- Transaction report (CSV, date-range export) — the full activity ledger
- behind both of the above, useful for pulling a quarter or a year at once
- instead of clicking into individual payouts one by one.
The mistake is asking the Earnings report to answer the payout question, or asking a payout total to explain per-order profit. They're not one report doing two jobs — they're two different reports, and reconciling your books means pulling both, not picking one and subtracting your own guess at what else moved.
What to actually do
- **Stop trying to match "what I sold this week" to "what deposited this
- week" by subtraction.** Pull the specific payout's detail list instead —
- it already did that subtraction, against everything that actually
- happened, not just the orders you remember.
- Use the Earnings report for per-order profit tracking. It's accurate
- at the order level even though it will never equal a specific payout.
- Expect a routine gap between orders sold and cash deposited if you buy
- labels, run Promoted Listings, or pay a Store subscription through eBay.
- That gap isn't an error to chase down to zero.
- Reconcile monthly rather than payout-by-payout once you understand the
- mechanism. The math behind the gap is consistent; daily detective work on
- it stops being worth the time.
- **If a payout is short by more than labels, ads, and subscription charges
- explain, check the hold timeline
- next.** That's a different mechanism with a different fix, and the two
- problems look similar enough to confuse.
Shopify Payments batches the same way — multiple orders and its own per-transaction rate net into one payout on its own schedule, under Settings → Payouts, so the same principle applies there even though the fee numbers differ. Discogs is the one platform where this specific problem doesn't come up: pay through Discogs Payments and the 9% selling fee is billed separately rather than netted out of a payout batch, and on a legacy PayPal Business setup, Discogs never touches the money at all — there's no eBay-style payout ledger to reconcile against, because Discogs isn't the one holding the funds.
PalmFlow computes the order-earnings side of this — final value fee, per-order fee, and your real cost basis — for every order it imports from eBay, Shopify, or Discogs, which is the Earnings-report half of the reconciliation above. It doesn't pull eBay's payout batches or your bank deposits; that side of the math still lives in Seller Hub's Payments tab, the same as the hold status it doesn't track either. The fee calculator has 2026's final value fee brackets built in if you want to check a specific order's math before it happens, no signup required. Free plan, 50 items, no card.
Disclaimer: this is general information, not accounting advice. eBay's fee rates, payout mechanics, and report layouts are eBay policy, not law, and can change — confirm current numbers and report names in Seller Hub before relying on them for your own bookkeeping.