Amazon Seller Payments: Get Paid More Frequently and Faster

How to request daily Amazon payouts and money in your account the next day.

Mar 28, 2024

Hey there! We’re realizing is a lot of newer sellers aren’t familiar with Amazon’s payout system. If you’re coming from eBay, one of the first things you’ve likely noticed is the longer timeframes it takes to get paid. If you’re an FBA seller, your balance doesn’t get updated until Amazon actually ships your inventory. Then they pay you on a bi-weekly basis like a W2 wagie.

In this post, we’ll cover a few options available to request payouts more frequently and have the money hit your account faster to improve cash flow.

The Benefits of More Frequent Payouts

Cash Flow Management

Daily payouts give you a constant flow of cash, allowing you to reinvest quickly, manage everyday expenses, and keep your business humming without the 2 week lull.

Anyone that says they prefer the 2-week payments just because they like seeing bigger sums of cash hit their bank account is simply fooling themselves. Any rational seller will want whatever cash they can get back into their account immediately. This is how you snowball your funds faster.

Financial Flexibility

Things move quickly in e-commerce, and so should your funds. You have no idea when the next big wholesale deal or closeout sale opportunity might come. Daily payouts mean you’re not stuck waiting for the next influx of liquidity to make time-sensitive decisions.

Yes, we realize there’s a thing called credit. But sometimes credit will not be an option.

How to Request More Frequent Payouts

What Are Amazon Daily Payouts?

The “Request Transfer” function is something I’m always shocked more sellers don’t know about. But, given how confusing Amazon’s UI can be at times, guess we don’t blame folks for not exploring all the screens. Manually requesting your funds is a feature within Seller Central that you can manually trigger to request available funds from your account immediately, rather than waiting on the next bi-weekly payment window. Again, this is something you have to manually do. It’s not a feature you can turn on to have Amazon do automatically.

Also to be clear, Amazon still needs to make the funds available to you first. So, just because you have a balance of $5,000 doesn’t mean that Amazon will allow you to request the full $5,000. Amazon will likely have an Account Level Reserve (more on that below) for a certain percentage of the funds.

How to Request Payouts Daily in Amazon Seller Central

Ready to punch yourself in the face with how easy this is?

Go to Payments
Select “Request Payment” under the “Funds Available” tile
Select the blue “Request Disbursement” button

And that’s it! If you have funds available, you’re payment will be initiated. Same process for desktop and mobile.

Request Disbursements Button Greyed Out?

For some of you, this feature will be greyed out. This is likely because:

You’re a very new seller. Just keep selling and you’ll eventually see this option enabled. If we had to guess, it’s because your account is considered higher risk to Amazon. Sorry, this is a common theme with Amazon
You already requested a payment within 24 hours. This is an obvious one but if you requested within the last 24 hours, you won’t see the option enabled until that period ends.
You did something to get your account flagged. Occassionally, a seller who previously had daily payouts enabled gets restricted to 2-week payments again. We’re not exactly sure why this happens, but would venture to guess it could relate to high return rates or Amazon has had to frequently claw money back from you. Complete guess, but worth an email to Amazon if it happens to you.

Amazon Account-Level Reserves

Understanding Account Level Reserves

Account Level Reserves are something you’re not going to be able to avoid. They serve a valid purpose as they are there to shield you from uncertain an influx in customer returns and protects Amazon from shady sellers.

Amazon can hold funds in your reserve for 14 days after the sale. They may continue to hold funds if you have pending chargebacks or A-to-Z claims. The only thing you can do to prevent higher than normal reserves is to keep your return rate and order defect rate (ODR) low. So, don’t sell garbage inventory.

Getting Paid Even Faster with Express Payouts

What are Amazon’s Express Payouts?

Express Payouts are new feature to help funds hit your bank account faster after requesting payment. Instead of waiting 5 days for funds to hit, you’ll get payments the next day in your bank account.

Eligibility requirements, per Amazon:

Have an account with an in-network U.S. bank routing number.
Have a business address in one of the 50 U.S. states. Sellers in U.S. territories are ineligible.
Have transactions of $1MM or below at the time of the payment initiation.

You can enable Express Payouts from the Deposit Methods screen in Amazon Seller Central. You can read more about Express Payouts from Amazon’s Express Payouts FAQ.

Summary

Again, for those that have been using Amazon for a bit now, we’re hoping this isn’t new info. But for newer sellers, hopefully this helps you get cash back into your account sooner so you can snowball even faster.

To recap:

Start requesting payouts from Amazon on a daily basis through the Payments menu
Enable Express Payouts through the Deposit Methods menu
Keep return rates and defect rates low to avoid higher Account Level Reserves

You’ll notice we didn’t talk about any third-party services to get even faster payments, such as Payability. For most of you, using a service like this won’t make much sense. These services charge very high fees for these services that often isn’t worth it, in our humble opinion.

Until next time!

BowTied Slinger

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