Why am I being charged for lab costs? Didn't my client pay for that?

The simple answer to this question is yes, in general, your clients have paid for the lab costs of the orders that are being sent to the lab for fulfillment.  However, let's break things down a little further...

There are two types of orders in the Instaproofs system:

1. Orders placed by your clients through your client galleries. The funds from these transactions are deposited directly to your Stripe account, which are in turn deposited to your bank account.
2. Orders that are sent from your account to one of our lab partners for fulfillment.  The credit card that you have on file with us is charged for the lab costs associated with these orders.

Although these two types of orders may be related to one another (if you are sending one of your clients' orders to the lab, for example), the transactions for both of these types of orders are handled independently. 

There are several reasons as to why the transactions are handled in this way, but basically it all boils down to the fact that we don't know how much the lab costs are going to be before the order is actually sent to the lab for fulfillment. Since our system is fairly versatile, you may have some client orders that you choose not to fulfill through our lab partners, you may have some lab fulfillment orders that were not created through your client galleries to start with, and you may have some client orders that you choose to add or remove items from before sending them to the lab.  In order to allow these types of things to happen, we keep the lab transactions separate from your client transactions.

Here's a basic rundown of a standard client order:

• Your client places an order for $150, as per your account setup.
• You receive the full amount of the transaction (minus your credit card processing fees) in your Stripe account, and a couple of days later the funds are deposited to your bank account.
• Your client's order costs $12 to fulfill, which is charged to your credit card.
• Your profit for the order is $150 - $12 - processing fees, which turns out to be a profit of roughly $133.65.