You discount a consignor's £200 jacket to £140 for Black Friday. Your commission is 30%. Do you pay them £140 minus 30%, which is £98 — or £200 minus 30%, which is £140, and absorb the whole discount yourself?
There is no universally correct answer. There is only the answer in your agreement, and for a surprising number of consignment and multi-vendor stores that agreement does not say, because nobody discounted anything in the first year. Black Friday is 27 November 2026, and this is the question to settle before it, not after.
The three ways to split a discount
Commission on the sale price
Vendor gets £98. You take £42. Both sides share the discount in proportion, which is the simplest to explain and the easiest to compute.
The objection vendors raise is fair: they did not agree to the markdown, and if you discount aggressively their margin falls on a decision they had no part in. If you use this model, you need a cap — a maximum discount you can apply without asking — or you will lose your better consignors after the first November.
Commission on the list price
Vendor gets £140. You take £60 of revenue against a £60 commission entitlement, which means you funded the entire £60 discount and kept nothing. Attractive to vendors, unsustainable for you at any real discount depth.
This one is worth modelling before you offer it. At 30% off and 30% commission you are exactly at zero. Anything deeper and you are paying for the privilege of selling someone else's stock.
A split you agree in advance
The discount is shared on a stated basis — half each, or the vendor funds the first 20% and you fund the rest. More work to set up, and the only one of the three that survives a deep sale with the relationship intact.
In practice the workable version for BFCM is: vendors opt in to the sale, at a discount depth they accept, in exchange for the promotion. The ones who opt out are not discounted. That turns a unilateral markdown into a deal, and it is much easier to ask in October than on the 26th.
Returns, and why December is the real problem
The discount question is arithmetic. The timing question costs more.
BFCM sales generate a return rate that lands in December, and the standard consignment cycle pays vendors monthly. Pay out at the end of November on gross sales and you will spend December clawing back money from people you have already paid — which is unpleasant, often unsuccessful, and the fastest way to make a vendor relationship adversarial.
Three ways to handle it, in increasing order of effort:
- Delay the November payout until the return window has closed. Say so in advance; vendors accept a known delay and resent a surprise one.
- Hold a reserve — pay most of it, retain a percentage against returns, release it in January. This is what most established consignment operations do.
- Net returns against the next period. Simplest to operate, worst for a vendor whose December sales are small, because the claw-back can exceed the next payout.
Whichever you choose, the reporting has to show the vendor what was sold, what came back, and what was withheld. A payout that arrives smaller than expected without a line-by-line explanation is the thing that ends the relationship, not the amount.
What to settle before the 27th
- Who absorbs the discount — stated per vendor, in writing, with a maximum depth you can apply unilaterally.
- Whether vendors opt in to the BFCM promotion, and by when.
- When the November payout runs, and whether a reserve is held.
- How returns are attributed — to the period of the sale or the period of the return. These give different numbers and both are defensible; pick one.
- What the vendor can see, and whether they can see it themselves rather than emailing you during your busiest fortnight.
The volume problem nobody plans for
A consignment store running forty vendors in an ordinary month reconciles a few hundred line items. The same store over BFCM weekend might do several thousand, and every one of them needs attributing to a vendor, a commission rate and a payout period.
If that reconciliation currently happens in a spreadsheet, November is when it stops working — not because the spreadsheet breaks, but because the person maintaining it is doing it during the busiest week of their year, at speed, and a mis-keyed commission rate is not caught until a vendor queries their payout in January.
Two things are worth checking before the sale, whatever tool you use. First, that commission rates are attached to the vendor or product rather than typed per order. Second, that a sale price flows through to the commission calculation automatically — if someone has to apply the discount by hand to each line, that is the step that will be skipped on the 28th.
How the vendor payout apps compare
Read from the live Shopify App Store listings on 8 October 2026. "Not listed" means the term does not appear on their listing, not that the app lacks it.
| Payvenda (ours) | Vendor Payout | Puppet Vendors | CollabPay | Shipturtle | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rating (reviews) | 4.7 (4) | 4.9 (45) | 4.8 (125) | 3.5 (26) | 4.8 (129) |
| Built for Shopify | No | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| Free plan | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Entry paid plan | $40 | $30 | $49 | $40 | $49 |
| Highest listed plan | $80 | $150 | $599 | $80 | $399 |
| Commission handling | Listed | Listed | Listed | Listed | Listed |
| Refund handling | Listed | Not listed | Listed | Not listed | Not listed |
| Vendor portal | Listed | Not listed | Listed | Not listed | Not listed |
Reading that honestly
We publish Payvenda, and two rows in that table are against us. We have 4 reviews — Puppet has 125, Shipturtle 129, Vendor Payout 45. And we are not Built for Shopify, where Puppet and CollabPay are. Seven weeks before BFCM, both of those are reasonable grounds to choose something else, and you should not discount them because the rest of the table is kinder to us.
What the table does show: we are the only app in this set with a free plan, and our top tier is $80 against Puppet's $599 and Shipturtle's $399 — those two are marketplace platforms, which is a bigger product than payouts and priced accordingly. If what you need is consignment payouts rather than a marketplace, you are not comparing like with like.
On the two rows that matter most for November — refund handling and a vendor portal — only ours and Puppet list both. Refunds are the BFCM problem, and a portal is what stops vendors emailing you in December to ask where their money is.
A seven-week plan
- This week: write down, per vendor, who absorbs a discount and to what depth. If the agreement is silent, this is the gap.
- Mid-October: ask vendors to opt in to the sale at a stated depth. Give them a deadline and a default.
- Late October: decide the November payout date and whether you hold a reserve. Tell vendors both.
- Early November: check commission rates are attached to vendors and products, not typed per order.
- Week of the 23rd: run a dry reconciliation on a normal week's orders, so the first time you run the process is not on 4,000 line items.
- Mid-December: reconcile returns before paying, not after.
Where to go next
Payvenda handles commission, refunds and a vendor portal, with a free plan to start on. For the returns mechanics in detail, see refunds and vendor payouts; for what vendors should be able to see, the vendor portal; and consignment apps compared without the BFCM framing.
