Meesho seller terms, explained in plain words

Meesho’s supplier panel, your shipping labels and your payment file are all written in abbreviations, and nobody hands you a key. Most guides either skip them or explain them in more abbreviations. Here is the actual list, in the order you meet them.

On the shipping label

AWB — Air Waybill. The 12–20 digit tracking number printed above the barcode. It identifies the parcel to the courier, and it is what your customer types into a tracking page. One AWB is one parcel: if an order ships in two boxes, there are two AWBs.

SKU — Stock Keeping Unit. Your own code for one exact variant. A red kurti in size M and the same kurti in size L are two SKUs, not one product. This distinction is the whole reason per-SKU margin is worth looking at — a product can look profitable in total while one of its sizes quietly loses money on every order.

Pickup hub — the courier branch that will collect your parcel, printed under the courier name. Two orders going to the same city can have different hubs if they are on different partners, which is why sorting by hub before printing saves you re-sorting a stack by hand when three riders arrive at three different times.

Tax invoice — the GST invoice Meesho prints below the shipping label on the same A4 page. It is a document for your records and the customer’s, not part of the shipping label, and it is what the label cropper removes. Keep a copy: your CA will want them.

Pick list — not printed by Meesho at all. It is the list you make for yourself of how many of each SKU the batch contains, so you can pull stock off the shelf once instead of walking back for every parcel. The cropper generates one from the labels you loaded.

In the payment file

Final Settlement Amount — the figure actually paid into your bank for an order, after Meesho has taken everything it takes. This is the honest starting point for any profit calculation, and it is where the profit calculator begins, precisely because every deduction below is already inside it.

Commission — Meesho’s cut. It varies by category and by price slab, so two items at the same price in different categories are charged differently.

Shipping charge — levied on the parcel’s weight and the distance travelled. A light item going across the country can cost more to ship than a heavier one going across town.

RTO — Return to Origin. A parcel that never reached the customer: refused at the door, address not found, or undeliverable. It comes back to you, and you pay shipping in both directions.

Return — a parcel the customer received and sent back. Also shipping both ways. The practical difference from an RTO is what arrives back: RTO stock is usually still sellable, a customer return often is not, and how much of it you really write off is a number only you know.

TCS — Tax Collected at Source, 0.5% of taxable value, collected by Meesho under GST law and deposited against your GSTIN. You claim it back when filing. It is not a fee Meesho keeps, but it does leave the settlement before the money reaches you.

TDS — Tax Deducted at Source, deducted under income tax law and deposited against your PAN. Same shape: recoverable at filing time, gone from this month’s cash.

Compensation / claim — money Meesho adds back when a parcel is lost or damaged in transit. These arrive as their own rows rather than as adjustments to the original order, which is why a tool that only reads delivered orders will miss them.

ADS — campaign spend, deducted at account level rather than per order. This is the one that most often turns a month that looked fine per-product into a month that was not.

The two that get confused most

Settlement is not revenue. Revenue is what the customer paid. Settlement is what reached your bank. The gap is commission, shipping, taxes and returns, and it can be large.

Settlement is not profit either. Settlement is what Meesho paid you. Profit is what is left after the things Meesho has never heard of: what your stock cost, what your packaging cost, your rent, your electricity, your salaries — and your own time, which almost nobody prices.

Meesho can report the first two accurately. It cannot report the third, because it does not have the inputs. That is not Meesho being cagey; it genuinely does not know what your kurtis cost you.

Dates, which are not what they look like

The dates in a payment file’s name are payment dates, not order dates. A file covering the first half of a month routinely contains orders placed weeks earlier — which is why comparing a payment file against that month’s sales report will never reconcile, and why it is not supposed to. If you want a longer view, load several payment files at once rather than trying to line one up with a calendar month.