Every charge Meesho takes out of your payout, decoded.
The number Meesho deposits is never the order value. Between the two sits a stack of charges — commission, shipping, penalties, reversals, and tax — and some of them are simply wrong. This guide breaks down every line on a Meesho payout, tells you which are real costs and which are claimable errors, and shows how to stop paying the wrong ones.
- A Meesho payout is order value minus commission (+18% GST on the fee), forward and reverse shipping, SLA and cancellation penalties, return/RTO reversals, and statutory TCS (0.5%) and TDS (0.1%).
- TCS and TDS are not costs — they are your own tax, prepaid, reclaimable in the GST portal and Form 26AS. Commission and correct freight are real costs. Wrong weight slabs, false reverse charges, and mis-applied penalties are recoverable errors.
- The only way to catch the wrong ones is to reconcile each charge to its order and rate. Robnu does that automatically and surfaces the recoverable deltas.
Your payout is the order value, minus a stack
When a buyer pays for a Meesho order, that money goes to Meesho first — not to you. Meesho holds it, waits for delivery, subtracts everything it and others are owed, and deposits the remainder on its settlement cycle. Every subtraction is a separate line on your settlement statement, and reading those lines is the difference between keeping your margin and quietly leaking it.
Most of the stack is legitimate — commission and correct freight are the genuine cost of selling on a marketplace. But two things hide in there: tax that you can reclaim, and errors that you can dispute. Knowing which line is which is the whole game.
Every line on a Meesho payout
Each of these is a separate deduction. For every one, the question is the same: is it correct at the agreed rate, or is it an error you can claim back?
Commission (+ 18% GST on the fee)
Meesho's category-based cut of the order value, with GST charged on the commission itself. The largest single line on most orders. A real cost — but check it matches the agreed category rate.
Real cost · verify rate
Forward shipping
Freight to deliver the order, priced by weight slab and delivery zone. A real cost — but a wrong (heavier) weight slab is a common overcharge worth catching.
Real cost · check weight slab
Reverse shipping / RTO
Freight to carry a return or RTO back to you. Legitimate on a genuine return — but a reverse charge on an order that was delivered and not returned is claimable.
Claimable if no real return
SLA & cancellation penalties
Charges for missing a dispatch deadline or cancelling an order. Legitimate on a genuine miss — but a penalty on an order you dispatched on time is a dispute.
Claimable if wrongly applied
TCS (0.5%, GST Section 52)
Tax collected at source on your net taxable supplies, credited to your GSTIN in the GST portal. Not a cost — reclaim it against your output GST.
Reclaim in GST portal
TDS (0.1%, Section 194-O)
Income-tax deducted at source on gross sales, reflected in your Form 26AS. Not a cost — adjust it against your income-tax liability.
Reclaim via Form 26AS
Why wrong charges survive
No single wrong charge is big enough to notice. A weight slab billed one step too heavy costs a few rupees; a reverse-freight charge on a delivered order is easy to miss in a statement of hundreds of lines. The loss is real precisely because each instance is small and the volume is large.
Meesho's settlement cycle spreads it out further: reversals for returns land weeks after the original payout, so a charge in this cycle can belong to an order you shipped a month ago. Without matching charges to orders over time, you cannot tell a legitimate reversal from a duplicate — so most sellers pay all of them.
How to audit your Meesho charges
- 01
Download every settlement file
Pull the full Meesho settlement statement each cycle, not just the deposit total. The line items are what you reconcile.
- 02
Match each charge to its order
Tie every commission, freight, penalty and reversal line to the specific order and the rate that should apply. Lump-sum totals hide per-order errors.
- 03
Check weight slabs against dispatch
Compare the billed weight slab to your actual dispatch weight per SKU. A repeated overcharge on one product compounds fast.
- 04
Verify every reverse charge
A reverse-freight or RTO line should correspond to a real return event. If there was no return, it is a claim.
- 05
Keep TCS and TDS filing-ready
Tally TCS and TDS per order and reconcile against the GST portal and Form 26AS at filing, so you reclaim every rupee.
- 06
Automate the reconciliation
Line-by-line matching across hundreds of orders is not sustainable by hand. Let Robnu match charges to orders and surface only the exceptions.
How Robnu audits every Meesho charge
Robnu ingests your Meesho settlement files and matches every charge line to the order it belongs to and the rate that should apply — keyed on order ID, amount and AWB. Correct charges are marked matched; anything that does not reconcile is surfaced as a delta with an estimated recoverable amount.
A wrong weight slab, a reverse charge with no return, a penalty on an on-time order, a duplicate line across cycles — these are the ones you file claims on. The TCS and TDS totals are kept filing-ready alongside, so nothing you are owed is left unclaimed.
Meesho charges, answered
A Meesho payout is the order value minus several separate lines: the marketplace commission, GST charged on that commission, forward and (on returns) reverse shipping, any SLA-miss or cancellation penalties, reversals for orders returned or RTO'd after settlement, and the statutory TCS and TDS. What lands in your bank is what remains after all of them, and each appears as its own line you can check.
Meesho's commission is a percentage of the order value that varies by product category, and GST at 18% is added on top of that commission (not on your product). Commission is usually the single largest deduction on an order. The exact percentage for your category is shown in Meesho's supplier pricing and on each settlement line — always reconcile the charged commission against the agreed rate for that category.
No. TCS (Tax Collected at Source, 0.5% under GST Section 52 since 10 July 2024) and TDS (0.1% under Income-tax Section 194-O since 1 October 2024) are your own tax, collected on your behalf and credited to you — TCS in the GST portal, TDS in your Form 26AS. They reduce your payout in the short term but you reclaim them at filing. They are not fees.
The recoverable ones are the wrong ones: a shipping charge on the wrong weight slab, a reverse-freight or RTO charge for an order that was not genuinely returned, a penalty applied to an order that was actually dispatched on time, or a duplicate charge across cycles. Commission and legitimate freight at the correct rate are not claimable — they are the real cost of selling. The skill is separating correct charges from errors, order by order.
Because several parties are paid before you: the marketplace (commission + GST on it), the courier (forward and any reverse freight), the tax authorities (TCS + TDS, which you reclaim), and any penalties or reversals. On a low-value order the fixed parts of this stack take a larger percentage, which is why thin-margin products can settle for far less than their sticker price.
Robnu reads your Meesho settlement files and matches every charge line to the order it belongs to and the rate that should apply. Correct charges are marked matched; anything that does not reconcile — a wrong weight slab, a reverse charge with no return, a mis-applied penalty — is surfaced as a recoverable delta so you can claim it, and the TCS and TDS totals are kept filing-ready.
Where these figures come from
- Meesho commission, shipping and settlement structure: Meesho Supplier “Commission Rate & Fee Structure” and settlement documentation, supplier.meesho.com.
- TCS at 0.5% under Section 52 of the CGST Act (reduced from 1% effective 10 July 2024) and TDS at 0.1% under Section 194-O of the Income-tax Act (reduced from 1% effective 1 October 2024): CBIC and CBDT guidance.