You sell on Amazon and need $50,000 for Q4 inventory by October. Banks do not get ecommerce. What do you use?

A bank secures a loan on something it can value and sell. Unsold inventory in a fulfillment center is neither; if you stop paying, the bank does not want three pallets of a product it has never heard of. Add that many commercial lenders do not treat marketplace payouts as ordinary revenue, and the decline is structural. Sellers on the forums describe exactly this: a profitable store, two years of growth, and a bank that could not read the file.

Revenue-based funders read the payouts. Amazon deposits every two weeks in a pattern that is visible in one glance, and an underwriter can size an offer to it without understanding the product.

Q4 stock has to be ordered by late summer to be manufactured, shipped, received and checked in before the inbound cutoffs, and the money to pay the supplier is due at order, months before the sales that repay it. Prime Day inventory increasingly overlaps the same window, so the cash is doubled at the exact moment the last quarter's payouts have been spent on the current one.

That timing is what makes this a funding question rather than a profit question. A seller who is comfortably profitable across the year can still be short $50,000 in September, and the shortfall is a timing gap, not a loss.

A working capital loan or a cash advance underwritten on the last three to six months of payouts. Decision in about a day, funding in one to three business days. Amounts run half to one and a half times a month's deposits, so a store with $60,000 a month in payouts can generally cover a $50,000 order in one offer.

Apply in August or September, when the statements show summer sales, not in November when the money is already late. And borrow the purchase order, not a round number.

A revenue-based advance with a true holdback — repayment as a percentage of deposits — fits ecommerce well because payouts are the repayment stream anyway, and the payment shrinks in the thin weeks of January. Ask whether the funder can take repayment from the payout account directly; some do, and it keeps the operating account clean.

It is. A business line of credit, set up in spring against the previous Q4's payouts, is the product for an annual inventory cycle: drawn in September, repaid from December and January payouts, costing nothing from February to August. It is the hardest of the four to qualify for and the one worth having most, because it turns a September scramble into a routine draw.