Adyen split payments: how to avoid mistakes that really cost

Adyen split payments look like a routing problem: some money goes to the seller, some to the platform. In practice, each split instruction answers two business questions. Who pays to process the sale, and who carries the loss if it’s charged back? Left alone, Adyen answers both the same way: the platform.

Anything you don’t assign stays with you, in one of your liable balance accounts. That covers interchange and scheme fees, splits aimed at a closed or unverified seller, chargebacks with no logic attached, and seller balances that stay negative past 30 days. So split design is a pricing and risk decision that happens to live in an API request, and someone has to make it on purpose.

We had to make it ourselves. Collimate, our white-label sub-merchant portal, sits on top of Adyen for Platforms and includes split configuration, so we’ve designed around these defaults. Here’s how Adyen split payments and fee groups work on the Balance Platform, and where we’d be careful.

The accounts behind an Adyen split payment

Adyen for Platforms comes in two models. Marketplace is for businesses whose brand both sellers and shoppers see. Platform is for commerce platforms, POS systems and payfacs. The choice matters early, because split configuration profiles only exist in the platform model, where they attach to each seller’s store. Marketplaces send splits with every request.

Your own money sits in three liable balance accounts. The main one holds your commission and, by default, bears the transaction fees. A reserved incorrect splits account catches funds routed to a seller who can’t receive them. Then there’s the reserved compensation account, which Adyen debits when a seller’s balance stays negative for more than 30 days. Below, “liable balance account” means the main one.

A warning about older material: classic integrations used MarketPlace where you now send BalanceAccount, and their chargebacks followed the original split. The Balance Platform does neither.

How an Adyen split instruction works

A split instruction is a list of items attached to a payment request, the splits array in the Checkout API. Each item says what the money is, which balance account gets it and how much, plus a reference you choose. Take a EUR 100 marketplace sale with a 10% commission:

Item	Split type	Goes to	Amount
Seller’s share	BalanceAccount	Seller’s balance account	EUR 90.00
Platform commission	Commission	Your liable balance account	EUR 10.00
Transaction fees	PaymentFee	Your liable balance account	Set by Adyen after processing

Your reference comes back as merchantReference in webhooks and reports. Make it unique per item. It’s what lets your ledger line up with Adyen’s later.

You can send splits at authorisation, at capture and on refunds. If you capture a different amount than you authorised, send splits with the capture, or the whole amount lands in your liable balance account. Chargebacks work differently: the issuer starts them, so the logic has to be in place beforehand.

A failed split doesn’t fail the payment. It’s the behaviour we’d flag first to any team new to Adyen. If a split targets a missing, closed or suspended balance account, or an account holder who can’t receive funds yet, Adyen still takes the payment and books the money to your reserved incorrect splits account, where it waits for an internal transfer.

Automate splits with Adyen split configuration profiles

Sending splits with every request gives you full control. It also means every service that creates, captures or refunds a payment has to build them correctly. Platform-model integrations can hand that job to split configuration profiles. Adyen Support switches them on, then you create a profile and link it to each seller’s store.

A profile is a set of rules. A transaction has to match all of a rule’s conditions, such as currency, payment method and funding source, before its split logic applies. That logic sets your commission, decides who pays each transaction fee, and can cover refunds and chargebacks.

Two habits we’d build in from day one. Add a catch-all rule with every condition set to ANY, because a transaction that matches no rule goes to your liable balance account. And remember that splits in an API request override the profile. One old service still sending its own splits will quietly bypass everything you configured.

Rules also need an owner after launch. In Collimate, your operations team creates split fee rules, assigns them to sub-merchant stores and starts new stores on a standard rule without manual work. Adyen executes them.

Fee groups and who pays Adyen transaction fees

Adyen doesn’t call them fee groups. We do, because it’s the easiest way to explain how the fee split types nest. A card transaction carries three costs you can allocate: interchange for the issuer, the scheme fee for the card network, and Adyen’s own fee. That last one shows up as markup on Interchange++ (IC++) pricing and as commission on blended pricing.

You can allocate them at three levels. PaymentFee covers everything. One level down, AcquiringFees bundles interchange with the scheme fee, and AdyenFees bundles commission with markup. At the bottom, Interchange, SchemeFee, AdyenCommission and AdyenMarkup each move a single fee.

Levels can be mixed, and the more specific instruction wins: PaymentFee to the seller plus AdyenMarkup to your liable account means the seller pays everything except Adyen’s markup. Send no fee split and Adyen adds a PaymentFee item pointing at your liable account. Adyen recommends sending one anyway, and so do we: an explicit item is a decision someone can trace.

Pass through or absorb

Start from your pricing model. If you sell one flat rate, absorb everything: PaymentFee goes to your liable account and your commission covers the cost. The risk is card mix, because premium, commercial and cross-border cards cost more. If card mix drives your costs, pass AcquiringFees to sellers and keep AdyenFees yourself. Full pass-through sends PaymentFee to the seller and leaves commission as your only revenue, while processing fees and 3D Secure costs still stay with you. On IC++, it can also show sellers your Adyen markup.

Our default advice is the unglamorous one: absorb fees until you have a reason to stop, and price your commission for your most expensive cards. Either way, sellers will ask what was deducted. They want the number that landed, which is why Collimate shows earnings after fees and lists each payment with its deducted fee.

Two worked examples of Adyen split payments

A EUR 100 sale, three fee strategies

A shopper pays EUR 100.00 by consumer credit card: EUR 90.00 for the seller and EUR 10.00 commission for you. Say interchange is EUR 0.30, scheme fees EUR 0.10 and Adyen markup EUR 0.60. Those figures are illustrative, and real ones depend on the card and your contract.

Fee allocation	Seller balance account	Your liable account
PaymentFee → liable (the default)	EUR 90.00	EUR 9.00
AcquiringFees → seller, AdyenFees → liable	EUR 89.60	EUR 9.40
PaymentFee → seller	EUR 89.00	EUR 10.00

Just one euro moves between the columns, but at the platform scale, that euro is your margin.

One basket, two sellers

A shopper buys EUR 100 of goods from Seller 1 and EUR 50 from Seller 2 in one checkout. You take 8% from each and absorb the fees. That makes four split items: BalanceAccount items of 9200 and 4600, a Commission item of 1200 and a PaymentFee item to your liable account (9200 + 4600 + 1200 = 15000 in minor units).

Now Seller 2 refunds their EUR 50 item. Send explicit splits with the refund: 4600 from Seller 2 and 400 from your liable account. Adyen debits the entire partial refund from your liable account, so don’t skip it.

Refunds, chargebacks and negative balances

From our experience, refunds are the first place where defaults on Adyen split payments bite. A full refund with no split data follows the original payment’s split ratio. A partial refund with no split data comes out of your liable account, so send splits on every partial refund.

Decide on changebacks before they happen. Set platformChargebackLogic on the payment, or the chargeback fields in a profile, and choose where the money comes from: your liable account, one named balance account, or the original split ratio. Leave it unset and Adyen takes the full disputed amount from your liable account.

If a refund or chargeback pushes a seller’s balance below zero, Adyen allows that for up to 30 days, then covers the gap from your reserved compensation account on the first day of the following month. Write the same allocation into your seller terms. An API setting can’t fix a contract that says something else.

Reconciling Adyen splits, and what changed in 2026

Adyen sends transfer and transaction webhooks for every split item, each carrying your split reference. The Balance Platform Accounting Report breaks fees out into interchange, scheme fee, markup and commission columns.

Reconcile all three liable balance accounts daily. The main one takes commission, default fees, unmatched profile rules and unconfigured chargebacks. The reserved compensation account can go negative itself, and then you top it up or move funds in.

The October 2026 changes to split processing

Adyen is rolling out two changes. Captures now use the latest active split configuration profile at the time of capture. Splits sent in the payment or capture request still take priority, but captures may generate new split references, so check delayed captures and any reconciliation that matches on them. Refunds and chargebacks now book with the split configuration that applies when the event is booked.

Test both in TEST first. Changes like these are why we tell platforms to budget for upkeep as well as the build: a sub-merchant portal typically takes six months or more, and then Adyen keeps moving.

Adyen split payments vs Stripe Connect and Mangopay

All three let a platform take a cut and pay sellers. They differ in how finely you can allocate processing costs.

	Adyen for Platforms	Stripe Connect	Mangopay
Your cut	Commission split item	application_fee_amount, or a smaller transfer	Fees on a pay-in, transfer or payout
Several sellers	Several BalanceAccount items	Separate charges and transfers	One transfer per seller wallet
Processing costs	Each fee component to platform or seller	Platform on destination charges, your choice on direct ones	Billed to the platform against collected fees
Rules without code	Split configuration profiles	Platform Pricing Tool for application fees	None, set per transaction

Adyen split payments give you the finest control over who pays what. The price is defaults that leave everything with the platform.

Adyen split payments checklist for platform teams

Before go-live, and again before any pricing change, we’d walk through five things with engineering and finance:

• Every payment request sends an explicit fee split, and every split item carries a unique reference.
• Every profile has a catch-all rule.
• Partial captures, overcaptures and partial refunds send their own splits.
• Chargeback logic is set on purpose and matches your seller contracts.
• Someone reconciles all three liable balance accounts daily.