The marketplace selling glossary.
RTO, SLA, SPF, TCS, breaching soon, volumetric weight — the jargon of Indian marketplace selling, defined plainly. Nearly every term here maps to a charge, a deadline, or a claim, which is why knowing them is knowing your own money.
- Most marketplace jargon maps directly to money — a charge, a deadline, or a claim.
- RTO, weight discrepancy and SLA penalties are the terms that cost sellers the most.
- TCS is the term worth knowing on the upside — it is your money, claimable back.
- Each term below links to the guide that goes deeper where one exists.
- Robnu turns the whole vocabulary into handled operations. Free while we figure out pricing.
Marketplace panels assume you already speak their language. This glossary is the translation layer — plain definitions for the terms that appear on your settlements, your order statuses and your penalty notices.
AWB
Air Waybill — the tracking number assigned to a shipment. Your reference for tracing a parcel and for any claim on it.
Breaching soon
A Meesho warning that an order is close to its dispatch deadline but has not missed it yet. A countdown, not a penalty.
Read the full guide →Breached
An order whose dispatch window closed without a handover. Carries a penalty and often auto-cancellation.
Read the full guide →COD
Cash on Delivery — the buyer pays at the door. Carries far higher return rates than prepaid because refusing costs nothing.
Read the full guide →Commission
The marketplace's share of each sale, deducted before your payout. Predictable, and rarely the cost that breaks unit economics.
Dead weight
The actual physical weight of a parcel, as opposed to volumetric weight. You are billed on whichever is greater.
Deduction
Any amount subtracted from your settlement before payment. Because it needs no approval, it often goes unexamined.
Read the full guide →DTO
A customer-initiated return flow, where a buyer who received the product sends it back. Distinct from RTO.
Read the full guide →Forward freight
The cost of shipping an order out to the customer. On an RTO you pay this and never earn revenue against it.
GSTIN
Goods and Services Tax Identification Number — your tax registration, required to sell on most marketplaces.
Lost in transit
A shipment that stops moving and never arrives. Claimable, but only if you notice the absence in time.
Read the full guide →Manifest
A document listing packages handed to a courier, signed on pickup. Your evidence that a handover happened, for SLA waivers.
Prepaid
An order paid for before dispatch. Returns at a small fraction of COD rates.
Read the full guide →Reverse freight
The cost of bringing a returned or undelivered parcel back to you. The core of an RTO charge.
Read the full guide →RTO
Return to Origin — a parcel that could not be delivered and is sent back. A double freight hit with no sale.
Read the full guide →RTV
Return to Vendor — goods sent back to a supplier, an inventory movement rather than a consumer return.
Read the full guide →SLA
Service Level Agreement — your promise to dispatch within a set window. Missing it triggers penalties.
Read the full guide →Settlement
The periodic report of what a marketplace paid you and what it deducted. Reconcile it order by order.
Read the full guide →SPF
Seller Protection Fund — Flipkart's mechanism for reimbursing losses outside the seller's control.
Read the full guide →TCS
Tax Collected at Source — deducted by the marketplace against your GSTIN. Not a cost; a credit you can claim back.
Read the full guide →Volumetric weight
A weight derived from a parcel's dimensions, pricing the space it occupies. Bulky light goods lose here.
Read the full guide →Weight discrepancy
A charge raised when the courier's measured weight exceeds the booked weight. Small, frequent, often wrong.
Read the full guide →You should not need a glossary to get paid correctly
Every term here exists because a marketplace made you responsible for understanding it. Robnu is an agentic OMS for AJIO, Meesho and Amazon sellers — it runs the operations these words describe, reconciles the charges they represent, and files the claims they entitle you to, so the vocabulary becomes something handled rather than something you study.
Common terms, answered
RTO stands for Return to Origin — a parcel that could not be delivered to the customer and is sent back to the seller. It is a delivery failure that costs the seller freight in both directions with no sale to show for it, which is why it is the defining economics problem in Indian marketplace selling.
SLA is the general term for Service Level Agreement. On marketplaces it usually refers specifically to dispatch SLA — the window within which you must hand an order to the courier. Delivery SLA is a separate, customer-facing promise about arrival, driven mostly by the courier network rather than by you.
TCS is Tax Collected at Source, deducted by the marketplace and deposited against your GSTIN. It is not a cost — it is your money held with the tax authority, and it is claimable as credit when you file your returns. A striking number of small sellers never claim it, turning a temporary deduction into a permanent loss.
It is a warning that an order is close to missing its dispatch deadline but has not yet. Nothing has been charged — it is a countdown giving you time to act. The common and expensive mistake is reading it as 'already breached' and de-prioritising an order that was still saveable.
SPF stands for Seller Protection Fund, Flipkart's mechanism for reimbursing sellers where an order goes wrong outside their control — lost in transit, damaged, or a return that comes back wrong or damaged. Claims are decided largely on evidence specification and deadlines rather than on the underlying facts.
Because most of it maps directly to money. Nearly every term here corresponds to a charge, a deadline, or a claim, and misunderstanding one usually means paying something you did not owe or forfeiting something you could have recovered. The vocabulary is the interface to your own settlement.