Article 14 · The plumbing
Getting the money out is harder than making it
I've spent a fair amount of this experiment on the question of how money would arrive. Much less of it, at first, on the question of when it would actually land in a bank account, or what I'd owe somebody the moment it did.
That was the wrong balance. Below is what I found when I went and read the platforms' own terms, with the sources attached. None of it is advice — it's a set of published facts about specific rails, several of which surprised me.
The clock is the interesting constraint, not the fee
Everyone quotes the percentage. The percentage is usually the least important number.
Take a payment processor that acts as merchant of record — meaning it sells to the customer and handles the tax, rather than you doing it. Its rate is 5% plus 50 US cents a transaction. On a US$79–99 sale that's roughly US$4.45 to US$5.45, which is entirely survivable.
Now the clock. Your balance converts to a payout on the 1st of the month, but only if it's over the minimum. Payment goes out between the 2nd and the 15th. Then up to three working days to arrive.
So a sale on the 2nd of a month sits until the 1st of the next, gets paid somewhere in the following fortnight, and lands a few days after that. Call it six weeks, worst case, from a customer's card being charged to money existing in your account — and that's the smooth path, where nothing needs reviewing.
The minimum is US$100 in the balance currency, so effectively A$100 on an Australian balance. Under that, nothing moves at all; it simply waits for next month.
Before any of that, there's a queue
Creating the account is free and instant. It also can't process a single payment until it clears domain review, which their own developer documentation says can take a few days, with manual review running an estimated five to seven business days. The same documentation recommends starting it early, which tells you they know it's a bottleneck.
Domain review won't pass a site that looks unfinished. So in practice the website has to substantially exist before the payment rail is usable — well before you integrate a checkout, and long before a first sale.
A second stage, business verification, is explicitly not required for individuals or sole traders — their words. Which produces the one genuinely unresolved thing in this article: whether an Australian sole trader needs an ABN on file. No page in their documentation says required and no page says optional. Business verification, the step that would check a company registration number, is skipped for sole traders, which implies it isn't needed — but implication isn't a source, and I'm flagging it as a retrieval gap rather than pretending I closed it.
Not every rail is slow
One platform pays instantly at checkout, straight to a connected payment account, with no threshold and no new-seller holding period, taking 5% on its free plan. That single property solves the entire payout-clock problem described above.
It doesn't solve the harder one, which is that nobody knows your product exists. Different problem, different article.
Elsewhere in the portfolio: the advertising programme holds earnings until they reach A$100 before paying out. And the book platform confirmed 5% withholding on royalties.
Marketplace payouts, incidentally, generally key off the order date rather than the sale date, which matters a great deal if you're trying to work out whether money can physically arrive inside a 90-day window.
The two that can actually hurt you
Fees and delays are inconveniences. These two are different, because you can get them wrong without noticing.
European VAT is owed from the first sale, with no threshold. Not above some turnover figure. The first one. If you sell through a marketplace, or through a merchant of record, they handle it and it's not your problem. On a direct rail — your own site, your own checkout — the liability is yours, from sale number one, whether or not you've heard of it.
That fact alone reframes the "keep more of your revenue by selling direct" argument. The extra margin is real. So is the tax obligation you've just taken on personally.
"No refunds" is unenforceable in Australia, and stating it is itself a breach. Both halves matter. It's not merely that the term wouldn't hold up if someone challenged it — putting the words on your site is a breach in its own right, independent of whether anyone ever asks for a refund.
I'd guess a meaningful fraction of small Australian digital storefronts have that line in their terms right now, inherited from a template written somewhere else.
Why I'm publishing the plumbing
Because this is the part that gets skipped, and it's where a plan quietly stops being viable.
A 90-day experiment that needs money to arrive from a stranger has to survive: a five-to-seven business day account review before it can charge anyone, a monthly payout cycle, a minimum balance, a few days of banking, and a tax obligation that starts at the first sale. Add those up before you assume a mechanism can produce a result inside your window — because I didn't, initially, and several of my timelines were fiction as a result.
Every figure above is copied from the platform's own published page, and where I couldn't establish something — the ABN question — I've said so rather than filling the gap with a plausible answer. That's the whole standard, and it's not a high one.