Marketplace Payouts Review

Use this skill to make marketplace payouts traceable, fair, supportable, and resilient to refunds or abuse.

Workflow

1. Identify marketplace type, parties, transaction model, fee model, payout schedule, risk window, and provider constraints.
2. Read references/marketplace-payout-systems.md.
3. Map buyer payment, platform fee, seller earnings, pending balance, holds, refunds, disputes, adjustments, payout, and reconciliation.
4. Separate ledger truth, displayed balances, provider state, policy decisions, and support evidence.
5. Define reserve/hold governance: reason codes, release criteria, SLA, owner, evidence, escalation, and appeal path.
6. Cover tax forms, named form/status examples when relevant, tax-form lifecycle states, withholding, statutory reporting handoff, sanctions screening, country eligibility, payout provider constraints, failed transfers, and negative balances.
7. Make payout policy concrete: clearing delay, reserve percent/duration, payout cadence, minimum threshold, supported currencies, provider fees, conversion policy, and fee responsibility.
8. Produce formal payout state machine, fee table, risk controls, compliance readiness matrix, seller dashboard/support workflow, trust metrics, audit invariants, and reconciliation checks.
9. For provider outages, partial payout files, webhook replays, or manual finance workarounds, name operational states explicitly: queued, paused, provider-pending, partially-submitted, failed, retry-blocked, reconciled, released, reversed, and manual-review.
10. For incident states, attach owner, entry evidence, exit gate, provider/status-page signal, support message, and audit invariant; recovery learning must include provider SLA evidence, monitoring, post-incident control fixes, and future resilience work.
11. For abuse holds, segment signals from conclusions: distinguish refund spikes, self-purchases, review manipulation, linked accounts, payout-threshold farming, legitimate launch winners, false positives, buyer-protection exposure, clawback/negative-balance paths, partial reserves, release criteria, appeal evidence, and reviewer QA.

When not to use