Articles on: Payments, Wallet & Earnings

Your Creatures Wallet: balance, holds, and getting paid

Your Creatures Wallet: balance, holds, and getting paid


Your Creatures Wallet is your real-money balance on Creatures. It is where the money from your sales lands, and it is what you withdraw to your bank. The Wallet card appears on your dashboard and on several earning pages, so your balance is always close at hand.


Your Creatures Wallet and activity


Available balance: what the number means


The large figure on the Wallet card is your Available balance.


  • What it is: cash from sales that have completed, meaning a buyer confirmed delivery and the funds were released to you. This is real money, and it is yours.
  • What you can do with it: spend it at checkout on Creatures, or withdraw it to your connected bank account. See Withdrawing your money to your bank.
  • The implication: the Available balance is the amount you could withdraw right now (once any one-time hold has cleared). It does not include money that is still held against an in-progress sale, because the seller is not paid until the buyer confirms delivery.


Creatures Credit is a separate line, and it is not cash


Below the balance you may see a second line, "+ $X Creatures Credit." This is easy to confuse with your Wallet, so it is worth being clear about the difference.


  • What it is: stored promotional value in your account, for example referral rewards or a redeemed gift card. It spends like money at checkout.
  • What it is not: it is not cash and cannot be withdrawn to a bank. Where your Wallet balance is money you can cash out, Credit can only be spent on Creatures.
  • The implication: the two are kept on separate lines on purpose. At checkout, Credit is always spent before your Wallet, so your non-withdrawable value is used up first. For where Credit comes from and how it is spent, see Creatures Credit: what it is and how it is spent.


How money enters your Wallet


Wallet money comes from completed sales, and the timing is deliberate.


  • A sale releases to your Wallet when the buyer confirms delivery. Your payment from a buyer is held by Creatures through the whole sale. The moment the buyer confirms the animal arrived, the proceeds are released into your Wallet, right away. There is no separate waiting period after that confirmation.
  • The 5% seller fee comes out first. Creatures takes a service fee of 5% of the sale, deducted from the proceeds before they land in your Wallet. So on a completed sale you receive the sale amount minus the 5% fee.
  • Unless you have Creatures Pro, in which case the seller fee is $0. If the selling account holds an active Creatures Pro subscription, that 5% seller fee is waived and you keep the full proceeds. See Seller fees and the Creatures Pro subscription.


Other earnings flow into the same Wallet too: caretaker, boarding, and storage payouts, transport payouts, referral commissions, and event organizer commissions. Each of those is itemized in your activity, covered in Reading your wallet activity.


Personal wallets and org wallets


If you own or co-own an organization, you have more than one wallet, and the card lets you move between them.


  • What you see: an Account selector appears at the top of the Wallet card, listing My Personal Wallet and each org you own or co-own (shown as "{Org name} (org)"). Without an org, there is no selector, just your personal wallet.
  • What it means: each wallet has its own balance and its own connected Stripe account. Your personal sales pay your personal wallet; an org's sales pay that org's wallet. They are kept fully separate.
  • The implication: pick the right account in the selector before you withdraw, because you are choosing which wallet the money leaves. The balance, the withdrawal state, and the Stripe destination all update to match the account you select.


Negative balance and wallet debt


A Wallet balance can occasionally go below zero. It looks alarming, but the system is designed to recover it gently.


  • How it happens: after a refund or a card chargeback on one of your sales, the amount that was released back can leave your balance negative, meaning you owe that amount back. The card shows a note explaining the cause (for example after a refund on a named animal, or after a payment dispute).
  • What happens automatically: while a wallet is negative, new sale proceeds apply to the debt first, and payouts are paused until the balance is back to zero or above. You do not have to do anything for this to work; your next earnings clear the debt.
  • Settling sooner: if you would rather clear it immediately, a "Settle now" button appears once the amount owed is at least $0.50, and it takes you to a quick card payment for the balance. Below $0.50, there is no button, because the next sale proceeds will clear so small an amount on their own.
  • The implication: a negative balance does not block you from selling, and it is not a penalty. It simply means the next money in goes to balancing the account before it becomes withdrawable again.


Where to go next




Updated on: 23/06/2026

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