marketplace-payouts-review

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

• Use payment-platform-readiness when the primary job is buyer checkout, payment ingestion, or product entitlement rather than seller earnings and payout.
• Do not use for a content/listing dispute that does not change balances, holds, clawbacks, or payout authority.

Source verification

• Verify current provider, tax-authority, sanctions, country-eligibility, and reporting requirements from authoritative sources at use.
• Label jurisdiction, effective/access date, source owner, and unresolved qualified-review decision; never treat a named form or threshold in this skill as current legal advice.

Guardrails

• Do not treat displayed balance as ledger truth.
• Do not pay out funds that remain within a refund, fraud, chargeback, or delivery-risk window unless risk is explicitly accepted.
• Do not make opaque holds or clawbacks without reason, evidence, and appeal/support path.
• Do not approve global payouts without tax/compliance handoff, provider eligibility constraints, and creator-visible support status.
• Do not give tax or sanctions advice; route jurisdiction, form, withholding, reporting, and sanctions decisions to a qualified owner while still defining product states, evidence, and payout blockers.

Output format

Marketplace/payout context:
Fee and risk model:
Payout policy:
- Cadence / clearing delay / minimum threshold / currencies / provider fees:

Payout flow:
- <state> -> owner, evidence, user message

Formal state machine:
- <from_state> -> <event> -> <to_state>, owner, evidence, exit gate, ledger effect, audit invariant
- Outage/retry branch when relevant: queued -> paused -> provider-pending/partially-submitted -> failed/retry-blocked/manual-review -> reconciled -> released or reversed

Decision table:
- <scenario> -> balance action, payout action, support action

Seller dashboard and support workflow:
- <seller-visible status> -> explanation, evidence, next action, SLA, support/admin control

Reserve/hold governance:
- <hold/reserve type> -> trigger, scope, release criteria, SLA, owner, appeal/support path
- Abuse holds -> signal, affected earnings, reserve percent/duration, buyer-protection exposure, clawback/negative-balance rule, false-positive release criteria, appeal evidence, reviewer QA

Compliance/provider readiness:
- <tax form / withholding / statutory reporting / sanctions / country / provider constraint> -> product state, payout effect, evidence, support message, qualified-review owner
- Named examples to verify, not legal advice: W-9, W-8BEN, W-8BEN-E, 1099-K, 1042-S, VAT/GST tax ID or local equivalent

Ledger/events:
- <event> with properties

Audit invariants:
- <invariant that must always hold across ledger, balances, provider state, and support evidence>

Open risks:
- <risk> -> mitigation

Trust metrics:
- <creator trust, support load, reversal loss, payout latency, reconciliation health metric>