Money you have earned on Amazon but cannot spend yet is being held by one of three separate mechanisms, and sellers routinely confuse them. A delivery-date based reserve holds the proceeds of individual orders until after delivery. An account-level reserve is different: it withholds a rolling amount sized against the refunds and claims Amazon expects you to generate, regardless of which orders those funds came from. The third is just a calendar, setting when releasable money leaves for your bank. All three stack, each is calculated on its own basis, and one of them responds to nothing you do.
Knowing which is holding your money changes your cash planning, and it changes your bookkeeping even more.
Mechanism one: the delivery-date based reserve
Amazon’s delivery-date based reserve policy holds the proceeds of an order until after the order has been delivered, plus a further period to cover the window in which a customer might return it or file a claim. Sellers usually refer to this shorthand as delivery date plus a number of days.
This is an order-level timing rule. It applies per transaction rather than as a lump against your account, which means the held amount naturally rises with sales volume and with shipping time. A seller whose orders take five days to deliver carries a structurally larger held balance than one delivering in two, at identical revenue.
These funds show in Seller Central as deferred transactions. Go to your payments dashboard, open Transaction View, and select Deferred Transactions. Each line shows the sale, the reason it is deferred, and the expected release date. That report is the authoritative answer for your account, and it is worth reading before accepting any general rule of thumb, including this article’s.
Mechanism two: the account-level reserve
The account-level reserve is different in kind. It ignores individual orders, withholding a sum against your account as a whole, sized to what Amazon estimates it may need to hand back to customers on your behalf.
That makes it a forecast of future liability, so it tracks your account’s characteristics rather than your sales: return rate, claim history, account health metrics, tenure, and category. Two sellers can post identical revenue and carry reserves that differ by a wide margin. Let your return rate climb and you will watch the reserve follow it.
This one stacks with the delivery-date reserve rather than replacing it. If a delivered order is well past its window and still has not released, the account-level reserve is usually what is holding it.
Mechanism three: disbursement timing
The third layer is the payout calendar. Funds that have cleared both reserves sit as available balance until the next disbursement runs. Of the three delays this is the shortest, and the only one driven by a schedule rather than by risk.
Distinguish one more thing. A payment hold placed after a policy or verification issue is not a reserve at all. It is an account action, Amazon normally tells you about it, and you resolve it through Seller Performance rather than by waiting it out.
What this does to cash
Take a seller running $200,000 a month, roughly $6,600 a day in gross sales.
Suppose orders average four days to delivery, and the delivery-date reserve holds them for a further week after that. Roughly eleven days of sales are held under that mechanism alone, around $73,000. Layer an account-level reserve sized at ten days of sales, another $66,000, and something close to $139,000 of earned revenue is unavailable at any given moment.
That money is real, and it is yours, and you cannot pay a supplier with it.
The operational consequence is that growth consumes cash on the marketplace side as well as the inventory side. Doubling sales does not merely double the inventory investment. It doubles the held balance too. Sellers who plan a peak-season inventory buy against expected revenue rather than expected disbursements get caught by this every year, and the fourth quarter is when the mismatch is largest, because the inventory outlay lands weeks before the sales that justify it release.
The bookkeeping consequence
Here is where reserves quietly corrupt financial statements.
A seller on cash basis records revenue when the disbursement lands. Under that treatment, a sale made on the 25th and released three weeks later appears in the following month, and the fees deducted along the way may never be recorded as expenses at all, because only the net deposit was visible. Gross revenue is understated, the cost structure disappears, and monthly trends become an artifact of payout timing rather than trading.
The accrual treatment is straightforward once stated. Recognize revenue when the sale occurs. Record the marketplace fees as expenses at the same time. Carry the reserved amount as a receivable from the marketplace, because that is exactly what it is: money earned, owed to you, not yet paid. When the disbursement arrives, it clears the receivable rather than creating revenue.
Done this way, the reserve appears on the balance sheet where it belongs, and the income statement stops moving for reasons that have nothing to do with the business. Sellers reaching for this usually do it through a tool that maps settlement data into the ledger automatically, such as A2X, Link My Books, or ConnectBooks, since reconstructing it by hand across several marketplaces is not sustainable past modest volume.
What you can and cannot change
The account-level reserve responds to account behavior, so the levers are the obvious ones: reduce returns, keep account health metrics strong, resolve claims quickly, and ship accurately. These work slowly and none is a guarantee.
The delivery-date reserve responds to delivery speed. Faster fulfillment shortens the hold, which is a genuine cash argument for fulfillment choices that is usually discussed only in terms of conversion.
The disbursement schedule is fixed by the marketplace.
What you can always do is plan around it. Build a rolling forecast of expected disbursements rather than expected sales, and time supplier payments and inventory commitments against that. The deferred transactions report gives you dated release information, which makes this a real forecast rather than an estimate.
The short version
Reserves are not a penalty and, in most cases, not a sign of a problem. They are the marketplace holding a buffer against liabilities it has assumed on your behalf. Treat them as a structural feature of selling on Amazon: forecast against disbursements, account for reserves as a receivable, and remember that every increase in sales increases the balance you cannot touch.
If a hold looks wrong or unexplained, the deferred transactions report and Seller Central case log are where the actual answer lives. General guidance on managing business cash flow is available through the Small Business Administration, though marketplace reserve mechanics are specific enough that the marketplace’s own reporting is the better reference.