There are a few reasons your payout might be less than expected:
Revenue share and payment processor fees
Bandcamp collects a revenue share on all sales, based on your sales history and the type of item being sold.
Sales and payouts are also subject to payment processor fees, which vary for digital and physical items based on geographic location and the payment method used at checkout. When we send you a bulk payout, PayPal’s fee is 1% of the total payout amount. If you’ve noticed a 1% discrepancy between your sales receipts and your payout, this fee is why.
Outstanding revenue share balance
If the fees above look squared away and your payouts still don’t add up, it’s possible that we collected additional funds on one of your sales to cover an outstanding revenue share balance on your account.
Because payments for physical items are sent directly and immediately to you, we are unable to collect our 10% revenue share at the time of sale. Instead, we keep a running tab of the amount owed, which we call your “revenue share balance.” That balance is automatically paid off with proceeds from future sales, such as part of a digital sale or an entire digital/physical sale.
You can always check your current revenue share balance by downloading your sales report and checking the “balance of revenue share” column. For sales where we take additional funds, you’ll also see an “Applied to your revenue share balance" line in your Cha-ching email for that sale. We recommend watching these Cha-ching emails to keep track of your balance (rather than your PayPal emails) and periodically visiting your Merch Orders menu (accessible via your Tools page) to keep track of any physical orders.
If you don’t sell merch on your Bandcamp page, but we still collected extra funds on one of your sales, you probably made some digital sales in 2015 or earlier, before we moved to our new payments system. Back then, payments for digital items went directly to you without being processed by Bandcamp first, just like physical sales do now.
In this case, the "Applied to your revenue share balance" line refers to the outstanding revenue share you accumulated in the old payment system, but still owed. Once your balance is settled, the amount we'll collect at the time of any given sale won't be more than 15% of that sale (unless you are also selling physical merchandise).