Vendor payouts in a WP Sell Services marketplace follow one path: the buyer pays, your commission is taken, the vendor’s share is credited to a wallet, and then you pay that balance out. In the free plugin, that last step is yours. Vendors request a withdrawal, you pay them however you like, and you mark it paid. Pro adds automatic rails for it: Stripe Connect and PayPal Payouts.
That’s the whole picture. The rest of this post fills in the parts a marketplace owner usually asks about: how the commission is worked out, how long earnings can be held, what a payout looks like day to day, and what happens when a refund arrives after the vendor has already been paid.
Commission: one rate, with overrides
Every order carries a split between your platform and the vendor. You set a global commission rate in Settings, and it applies to every vendor unless you’ve given a particular vendor their own rate. That per-vendor override is in the free plugin, and it always wins over the global rate. It’s useful for a promotional rate for new vendors, or for a partner you’ve agreed different terms with.
If the rate should depend on the sale rather than the vendor, Pro adds tiered rules that match on service category, seller level or sales volume. The first matching rule wins, and rules are never stacked or averaged.
One detail worth knowing: the split is worked out once, when the order is paid, and stored on the order. Change your commission rate next month and the orders already paid keep the rate they were paid at. Nothing rewrites history behind your back, which is what you want when a vendor asks you to explain a figure from March. The commission system docs cover the rate settings step by step.
Earnings land in a wallet, then clearance applies
When an order completes, the vendor’s share is credited to their wallet. (Milestone phases are credited when the buyer pays them, because that’s when the money arrives. See milestone payments for how that differs.)
Credited doesn’t have to mean withdrawable. The clearance period is the number of days earnings are held before the vendor can request them. It ships at zero, meaning no hold, because how long to sit on someone else’s money is a policy decision and not something the plugin should impose. Set a refund window of a week or two and a vendor can’t withdraw an order’s earnings until it passes, which gives late disputes and chargebacks time to show up first.
Neither choice is wrong. A short or zero clearance period is friendlier to vendors. A longer one protects you from paying out money you may have to give back.
Paying vendors in the free plugin
The free workflow has no integration to connect, and it works for a lot of marketplaces for longer than you’d expect.
A vendor opens their earnings page, sees their available balance and requests a withdrawal, choosing a payment method and giving their details. You see it in Withdrawals, review it, and approve or reject it. If you reject it, the money goes straight back to the vendor’s available balance. If you approve it, you send the payment yourself: a bank transfer, PayPal, Wise, whatever you already use. Then you mark it paid, and the ledger records the debit.
Two things make this less manual than it sounds. First, you can turn on scheduled auto-withdrawals, which are also in the free plugin. Pick a threshold and a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly schedule, and the plugin raises withdrawal requests for any vendor whose balance has passed the threshold and who has a payment method saved. You still approve and pay each one. What you’ve automated is the chasing, not the paying. The automated payouts docs have the details, including how the schedule behaves.
Second, there’s a CSV export on the Withdrawals screen. It follows the status and method filters you’ve set, so you can export every approved PayPal request, load the file into your bank’s or PayPal’s bulk upload, pay the lot and then mark each one paid. The export itself never changes a status, so a failed transfer can’t be silently recorded as paid.
What happens when a refund arrives after a payout
This is the case that makes owners nervous, and it’s worth understanding before you launch.
A refund reverses the platform fee and the vendor earnings in proportion. If the vendor hasn’t been paid yet, their balance just goes down. If they have been paid, the balance goes negative: an honest record of a debt, which future earnings pay down automatically as they come in. The vendor can see it on their earnings dashboard.
If you’d prefer that conversation never happens, that’s what clearance days are for. Hold earnings for as long as your refund window runs and most reversals land before the money has left.
What Pro adds: Stripe Connect and PayPal Payouts
Pro doesn’t change the ledger. Every rail settles against the same wallet balances, so you can mix them and move between them without orphaning anything. What Pro changes is who does the paying.
Stripe Connect pays vendors as the sale happens. Each vendor connects a Stripe account through Stripe’s own hosted onboarding, so you never handle their bank details. When a buyer pays, your platform fee stays with you and the rest goes to the vendor’s connected account. The fee comes from your normal commission rules, unless you set a separate Connect fee on purpose. Vendors who don’t connect aren’t blocked. They earn into the ordinary wallet and request withdrawals like anyone else. Setup is in the Stripe Connect docs.
PayPal Payouts is for the batch route. Vendors add a payout email, you select the balances owed and send a single batch, and each payout is settled on the ledger once so a balance can’t be reduced twice. A batch can be re-synced with PayPal if part of it failed.
Neither one is required. The vendor payouts docs lay out each rail and when to use it, and free vs Pro shows the tier split.
Choosing a setup that fits your size
A handful of vendors: stay on manual withdrawals and mark-paid. There’s nothing to configure and nothing to break.
Growing, and tired of chasing requests: add scheduled auto-withdrawals plus the CSV export, and keep control of when money leaves.
Many vendors who already take PayPal: batch them with PayPal Payouts. High volume, with a Stripe account already in place: Stripe Connect, so each sale settles itself.
You can change your mind later. Start simple, and add an automatic rail when the weekly payout run starts eating real time.