Telling merchants where their money is

The question support kept answering

For a small business, a deposit is rent, payroll and inventory. If it’s late or smaller than expected, merchants notice right away.

WooPayments paid every merchant on the same fixed schedule, and the overview showed balances and deposits as one grid of numbers with no explanation of which money was available, pending or held back. Delays from bank holidays or a new account’s holding period showed up without warning. Support heard the same question over and over: where’s my money?

I worked on deposits across four projects. All of them had to fit inside WordPress admin, which looks much the way it did a decade ago and is shared by every plugin a merchant has installed. A modern redesign wasn’t on the table, so each project leaned on clearer structure and better words instead of new visuals.

Choosing when to get paid

The first project let merchants pick a schedule: daily, weekly on a day they choose, or monthly on a date. The controls live in WooPayments settings, and the overview shows the schedule in plain words with a link to change it.

Schedules. “Automatic, monthly on the 17th,” written the way a person would say it, with an estimated date for the next deposit.

Giving merchants a schedule meant telling them when it wouldn’t hold. I designed notices for the two most common delays, a new account’s seven-day hold and upcoming bank holidays, in the same spot on the overview and the deposits list every time. They stay up for as long as the delay applies instead of being dismissible, since dismissing a notice doesn’t make the delay go away.

Manual deposits

Some merchants wanted to decide for themselves when to move money. Manual deposits add a fourth option: funds stay in your balance until you click Deposit funds.

Manual deposits. The button sits on the balance it acts on.

I cut this release down to functional changes to hit the 5.0 milestone. One decision got a lot of debate: when Manual is selected, the schedule fields are disabled rather than hidden, so the page doesn’t jump and it’s obvious what you’d get back by switching. When a deposit isn’t possible, like a balance under the minimum or a deposit already made today, the button is disabled with a tooltip that says why.

Where your money is, and where it’s going

The biggest project rebuilt the Payments overview from the Woo design library and split the old grid into two ideas: balances, meaning what you have, split into available and pending, and deposits, meaning what’s on its way to your bank and when.

Before and after. Each change annotated for engineering and docs.

Most of the work was the copy. The card says the next deposit is an estimate while payments are still coming in. It says plainly that we can estimate when a deposit will be sent, but we can’t guarantee when it will arrive. It explains that deposits pause when a balance goes negative, worded differently for a bank account and a debit card, because the processor can pull money from one and not the other.

Our processor offered an estimated arrival date, and the obvious move was to show it. The engineering lead argued that being honestly vague builds more trust than being precise and sometimes wrong. I agreed, so we kept “1–2 business days” and only show specifics while a deposit is in transit.

Testing the new overview

Before handing off, I tested the old overview and the new one with twelve merchants in a short unmoderated study. Each was asked three things: how much money they could withdraw today, when their next deposit would arrive, and why it might be late.

• 92% found their available balance on the new overview, against 58% on the old one

• 11 of 12 correctly explained why a deposit was paused

• 4.6/5 average rating for how clear the deposit information was

“This is the first time I’ve looked at this page and known what was actually mine.”

— Test participant

For stores selling in several currencies, a currency switcher inside the balance card replaced a stack of duplicate cards, which had been pushing everything else below the fold.

Paid in 30 minutes

The last project scaled instant deposits, which move funds to an eligible bank account in about half an hour for a fee. Engineering was decoupling transactions from on-demand deposits, which touched almost every deposit screen.

Instant deposits. What’s available now, the fee, and exactly what you’ll receive before you commit.

• Stop predicting the future. We no longer projected deposits beyond the next one, since the next estimate was simply your available balance. That removed a redundant table and let the card describe the schedule in a sentence.

• Turn it on for people who qualify. Eligible merchants with a compatible bank account get instant deposits enabled and announced with a banner. Eligible merchants with the wrong kind of account get a task to link one.

• Limits in context. Daily limits and fees live inside the deposit modal, where the decision happens.

• A receipt, not confetti. A successful deposit adds a small dismissible receipt to the new row in your history. I tried confetti. It felt wrong for money.

Outcome

In eighteen months merchants went from a grid of unlabelled numbers to an overview that says how much money they have, where it is, when it’s arriving and what might delay it. Custom schedules, manual deposits, delay notices, the new balances and deposits cards, and instant deposits all shipped, and the redesigned overview became the pattern other WooPayments teams built on. In the quarter after the new overview launched, deposit-related support conversations fell by about a third.

Some details are simplified or left out to respect client confidentiality.