Split every sale, hold every escrow, pay every seller
Buyer payments, escrow holds, fee splits, refunds, and seller payouts: one ledger keeps every party's position exact across all of it.
Marketplace money has too many owners
Between buyer and seller, funds pass through states your PSP does not track.
A sale is a buyer payment, an escrow period, a commission, sometimes a shipping split, then a payout, and a refund can interrupt any step. PSP balances tell you the total; they cannot tell you whose money it is.
Funds held between sale and delivery belong to no one system: escrow is a database flag.
Commission, shipping, and promo splits are hard-coded and change with every category.
Refunds after payout drive seller balances negative, and recovery is manual.
Seller payout questions ("where is my money?") take support tickets to answer.
_PROOF/ Marketplaces run seller balances and escrow on Formance, with payouts derived from the ledger.
From checkout to seller payout
Escrowed at purchase, split at release, paid on schedule.
The buyer's payment lands in escrow, delivery releases it through the declared split (commission to the platform, remainder to the seller's payable), and payouts pay exactly what the ledger holds. Refunds reverse the same path.
See marketplace payments on a live ledger.
Access a demo of a marketplace payments flow of funds, on a live Formance ledger. Follow the flow step by step, and deploy the schema to your sandbox.
The primitives marketplaces need
Built on the open-source Formance ledger.
Native escrow, declarative splits, and derived seller payouts, composed for multi-party commerce.
Funds held between purchase and release live in real ledger accounts with explicit states, not a boolean on an orders table.
real escrow
Commission, shipping, promos, and taxes declared in Numscript per category or seller tier, changed by configuration rather than release.
per-category splits
Read the Numscript docsEvery seller's payable derived from sales, refunds, and adjustments in real time, surfaced in the seller dashboard straight from the ledger.
self-serve answers
Captures, refunds, and payout files from every PSP normalize and match continuously against ledger state.
multi-PSP, one truth
Marketplace-grade, by design
Release escrow through the split
Delivery confirmed, everyone paid their share, atomically.
When delivery confirms, one Numscript transaction releases the escrowed payment through the declared split: platform commission out, seller payable credited.
Try it in the PlaygroundTrusted by builders
“Formance enabled us to ship new lending products faster by providing a customizable foundation that let us reliably express the complexities of our flow of funds.”
Embedded finance · reconciliation across 14 countries
See customer story
“Formance is the foundation of our Financial OS, the open-source approach lets us retain control over this key component.”
Healthcare · Financial OS
“Formance helped us kick off our move into fintech, with robust infrastructure and intuitive developer tooling.”
Benefits · fintech infrastructure
Keep going
Everything you need to evaluate and build on Formance.
Marketplace flows, answered
01 / WHAT HAPPENS ON A REFUND AFTER PAYOUT?
The refund debits the seller's payable as a ledger transaction. A negative position nets against future sales, tracked automatically rather than chased manually.
02 / CAN SPLITS DIFFER BY CATEGORY OR SELLER TIER?
Yes: splits are declared per category, tier, or even per listing. New commercial terms are configuration, applied atomically from the next transaction.
03 / DOES ESCROW WORK WITH OUR PSP?
Yes: the PSP moves the money; the ledger tracks whose it is and what state it is in. Escrow, release, and refund are ledger states reconciled against PSP events.
04 / CAN SELLERS SEE THEIR OWN BALANCE?
Yes: seller dashboards read derived balances straight from the ledger (sales, fees, refunds, and upcoming payouts) without a support ticket.
Every party paid, every cent provable
See how Formance fits your marketplace: book a demo or start building.