Taking a deposit before you start

Someone wants sixty cupcakes for a christening on the 22nd. They want a colour of fondant you'd never otherwise stock. The christening is three weeks away, and right now you have a message, an enthusiastic voice note, and nothing else.

Take a deposit that covers everything you can't get back if they disappear. For most made-to-order work that's 50% of the total. For anything with a name piped on it, or a size only that person wears, take the whole thing. Ask at the moment they say yes, in the same message as the price, and say the word "non-refundable" out loud before any money moves rather than after.

That's the answer. The rest of this is how to work out your own number, what to actually type, and what to do when the person you took KSh 2,250 from three weeks ago messages to say their plans changed.

What a deposit is actually for

It is not a good-faith gesture and it is not a way of showing you're professional. It's a specific piece of financial engineering that does two jobs.

The first is covering your sunk cost. Once you've bought 400g of navy fondant and a box of foil cases in a size you don't use, that money has left. If the order dies, so does the money, unless somebody else already gave it to you.

The second job is the one that matters more, and almost nobody names it: a deposit converts a maybe into a customer. People who have paid you something turn up. People who have only agreed do not. Enquiries where money has moved cancel at a rate that isn't in the same universe as enquiries where nobody has paid anything, and the reason is boring psychology rather than contract law. Having paid, they've decided. Not having paid, they're still shopping.

So the deposit's real function is to end the shopping. It's cheaper for you to lose the enquiries that won't pay a deposit than to lose three Saturdays to them.

How much to ask for

Start from what you can't recover, then round up to something a human can say.

What you're making	Deposit	Why that number
Stock item you'd sell anyway	Nothing	You can sell it to the next person. Take full payment or nothing
Made to order, generic (a bag in a colour you carry)	30–50%	Materials plus your first afternoon
Made to order, personalised (a name, a date, a size)	100%	Nobody else will ever buy it
Perishable and dated (cake, catering, flowers)	50% now, balance the day before	You buy fresh two days out and cannot store it
Service with a booked slot	20–50%	You're selling time you can't resell once the day passes
Bulk or corporate order	50%, or your full material cost if that's higher	Big orders die for reasons that have nothing to do with you

The important line in that table is the first one. If you're selling something already sitting on your shelf, a deposit is a bad idea. It gives you half the money, all of the admin, and a customer who now has an unfinished transaction sitting in their head. Take the whole amount or take nothing.

The floor is unrecoverable cost. If the fondant, the boxes, the courier booking and the fabric come to KSh 1,800, then a KSh 1,500 deposit is not a deposit, it's a discount on your own risk. Work the number out once, per product type, and write it down. Recalculating it in the middle of a conversation is how you end up saying "oh, whatever's easiest" and losing.

Ask at the moment they say yes

The single most common mistake is asking for a deposit late. You quote, they say "perfect, let's do it", you say "great, I'll get started", and four days later you send a payment request that now reads like a change of terms.

The deposit belongs in the same message as the price. Not the next one.

Sixty cupcakes, navy and gold, ready for collection on the 22nd: KSh 4,500. To book the date I take half up front, KSh 2,250, and the rest on collection. The deposit covers ingredients I buy specially, so it isn't refundable once I've started. Shall I send you the details?

That's four sentences and it does everything. It states the total, states the deposit, states why, states when the rest is due, and ends with a question that makes paying the obvious next move. There's no apology in it and no legal noise either.

The bit that does the heavy lifting is "the deposit covers ingredients I buy specially". A customer will argue with a policy and will not argue with a reason. Give the reason every single time, even when you're tired of typing it.

Saying non-refundable without sounding like a lawyer

The word itself is fine. What makes people flinch is the paragraph that usually surrounds it.

Compare these two.

Bad: "Please note that all deposits are strictly non-refundable under any circumstances. By making payment you agree to our terms and conditions. We reserve the right to retain the full deposit amount in the event of cancellation."

Better: "The deposit isn't refundable, because I buy the ingredients for your order specifically. If you need to move the date, tell me before the 19th and I'll move it for free."

The second one is shorter, warmer, and enforceable in exactly the same way as the first, which is to say: by having said it before the money moved. That's the whole mechanism. A deposit is non-refundable because the buyer agreed to that in writing before paying, not because of the font it was written in.

Three rules that keep it simple:

• Say it in your own words, not in words you copied from a wedding photographer's contract. The mismatch in register is what makes buyers suspicious.
• Say it before the payment, in the message that contains the payment details. Not on a terms page nobody opened.
• Always pair it with something you will do. Free date changes. A partial credit toward a future order. One flexible thing makes the firm thing acceptable.

If you're writing this once and reusing it, the phrasing that survives contact with real customers is covered in more depth in writing terms people will actually read. Keep it to five lines.

The grace window that removes most disputes

One adjustment kills most cancellation arguments outright: make the deposit fully refundable for the first 24 hours, and non-refundable after that.

It sounds like you're giving something away. You're not. You're moving the refusal to a point where you haven't spent anything yet. Almost every genuine change of heart happens the same evening, when they tell their partner what it cost. Almost every dispute happens later, when you've already bought the materials and they've already forgotten what they agreed to.

So the line becomes: "If you change your mind today, just tell me and I'll send it straight back. After tomorrow I've bought the ingredients, so I'd have to keep it."

Now the buyer feels looked after, you keep the deposits that matter, and the awkward conversation happens on day zero instead of day fourteen. Sixty seconds of your time on the rare occasion someone uses it.

Taking the deposit on a manual rail

If you're on cards, the deposit is a charge and the balance is another charge, and you never think about it again. On a bank transfer, mobile money or cash, you have two payments to track for one order instead of one, and that's where deposits actually go wrong.

Do these four things.

1. Give the deposit its own reference. If the order is SL1042, the deposit is SL1042D and the balance is SL1042B. Two credits, two labels, no guessing three weeks later which half you're looking at.
2. State the exact figure, not the percentage. "Send KSh 2,250" gets sent correctly. "Send 50%" gets sent as KSh 2,200, KSh 2,000, or whatever felt round. This is the single most common cause of a deposit arriving short.
3. Confirm the deposit in writing the moment you see it in your account. Not when they say they've sent it. The difference matters, and the full method is in how to know a bank transfer actually arrived.
4. Write the balance and its due date in the same confirmation message. "Got the KSh 2,250, you're booked for the 22nd. Balance of KSh 2,250 on collection." That message is now the record both of you will scroll back to.

The confirmation message is the deposit's paperwork. It costs you fifteen seconds and it's the reason the conversation on the 22nd is short.

When the balance is due

Pick one and use it for everything, because the mental cost of deciding per order is worse than the cost of occasionally being wrong.

• Perishable or dated work: balance the day before, or on collection. Never after delivery. Once the cake is in their car, you have nothing left to hold.
• Physical goods you post: balance before dispatch. Say so at the point of the deposit, so the reminder isn't a surprise.
• Services: balance on the day, before you start. A photographer who shoots first and invoices after is a photographer with an unpaid invoice.
• Long builds over three weeks: stage it. Deposit, a middle payment when they approve the design, balance before it ships. Three payments sounds fussy and it's how you avoid carrying six weeks of someone else's materials cost.

Staged payments have their own set of traps, mostly around what happens when the customer keeps changing the design after they've approved it. That's a bigger topic and it's worked through in getting paid for a custom order.

When to break your own rule

You will, and you should, and it's worth deciding in advance when.

Give the deposit back when the reason is a genuine emergency, when the customer is someone you'll see again in a small community, or when keeping it will cost you more in reputation than the money is worth. A KSh 2,250 deposit is not worth a review that says you kept a bereaved family's money.

Keep it when the reason is "we decided to go with someone cheaper", when it's the third change of date, or when the materials are already bought and specific.

And when you do give it back, say why in a way that protects the rule: "Normally I'd keep this because I'd already bought the fondant, but given the circumstances I've sent it back in full." That sentence refunds the money without repealing the policy.

One more, and it's the awkward one. If you find yourself refunding most deposits, the deposit isn't your problem. Your quote is too high, your enquiries are the wrong people, or you're taking bookings you don't have time for and quietly hoping they cancel.

Worked example: Wanjiru, custom cakes, Nairobi

Wanjiru makes celebration cakes in Kasarani. Her standard eight-inch is KSh 4,500, a two-tier is KSh 9,000, and she takes maybe fourteen orders a month, almost all of them through Instagram DMs and almost all paid by M-Pesa.

For her first year she took no deposit at all. She'd agree an order, buy ingredients on the Thursday, and find out on the Friday that the party was off. She reckoned she lost three or four orders a month that way, at around KSh 1,200 of wasted ingredients each. Call it KSh 4,000 a month, which was most of a week's profit.

She now asks for exactly half at booking, quoted as a number, with the balance on collection. Her message is three lines and she pastes it every time. The deposit is refundable until the next morning and not after.

Two things changed that she didn't expect.

The first is that her enquiry volume dropped by about a third and her order volume went up. The people who evaporated were the ones who were never going to buy. She stopped spending Tuesday evenings on those conversations.

The second is the one worth stealing: she puts the collection date in the deposit request. "KSh 2,250 to hold Saturday the 22nd." Holding a date is a thing people understand paying for. Half of a cake is not. Same money, completely different resistance, and it's the only wording change she's made in two years.

Her M-Pesa till number sits in the bank transfer instructions on her shop page, with the line "send the deposit shown on your order and put your name in the reference". Her buyers see her registered business name before they confirm, which does more for trust than anything she could write herself.

What Sailo does here, and what it doesn't

Sailo has no deposit feature. There's no part-payment field, no "50% now" toggle, and an order is unpaid, pending, paid or refunded with nothing in between. If you want half the money now, you're modelling it yourself.

Two workarounds that hold up:

• Sell the deposit as its own product. A "Custom cake booking deposit" at a fixed KSh 2,250, listed like anything else. The buyer orders it, pays it, and you have a clean paid order and a reference. The balance is a second order, or cash on collection.
• Use the bank transfer instructions box. Put the deposit rule there in plain words, take the full order at full price, and leave it pending until the balance lands. Your admin then shows what's outstanding, which is roughly what you want anyway.

The first is tidier if you take deposits often. The second is fine if you take one a fortnight.

What Sailo can't do is tell you the deposit arrived. It never touches money on bank transfer, M-Pesa, cash or COD, and it charges nothing on those rails for exactly that reason. Only your own banking app or your till SMS can confirm a payment. That's the honest shape of every rail where the platform isn't holding your money, and it's covered from every angle in how to take payment as a small seller.

Do this before your next quote

Work out the unrecoverable cost of your most common made-to-order item. Materials, courier booking, anything you buy specially. Round it up to a number a person could say out loud, and that's your deposit for that product from now on.

Then write your four-sentence message, with the total, the deposit as a figure, the reason, and the 24-hour window. Save it where you can paste it in two seconds. Use it on the next enquiry that comes in, without editing it to sound softer, and see whether they pay.

If they don't, you found that out for free instead of on a Thursday with a boot full of fondant.