How Much Deposit Should You Take on a Custom Order? What 63 Real Deposits Show

Short answer: take enough to cover what you can’t get back if the customer walks — materials already bought, a date you can no longer resell, work already done. That’s a number only you can calculate. The “50% is standard” advice you’ll find everywhere is close to the middle of what sellers actually charge, but the spread around it is so wide that it tells you almost nothing about your own business.

A customer asks for something made to order. You agree a price and a date. Then comes the question that has no obvious answer: how much do you ask for upfront?

Search it and you’ll get the same number back from everyone. Fifty percent. Industry standard.

I wanted to know whether that was true.

Is 50% really the industry standard?

Here’s what the top results actually say, and what’s behind them:

Source	Claim	Cites data?
Alibaba seller blog	50% is normal for custom apparel orders	No
BakeProfit	50% non-refundable is the standard for custom cakes	No
Luke’s Furniture	50/50 is the industry standard, “completely reasonable”	No
That’s The One	50% most common for venues and caterers; 30% for florists and planners	Yes — 2,207 explicitly marked deposits

One source in four has anything behind it, and it covers weddings specifically. The rest assert the same round number and move on.

That’s not a reason to dismiss 50%. A figure repeated by practitioners across unrelated trades is usually tracking something real. It’s a reason to stop treating it as a rule when nobody has checked whether sellers follow it.

We can check.

What do sellers actually charge?

Every WISMO order can carry a price and a set of recorded payments, so a deposit is measurable: the first payment recorded against an order, divided by that order’s price, where the first payment came to less than the full amount. Because it’s a ratio it carries no currency, so sellers across all 11 currencies in our data count together.

Across 63 deposits from 10 sellers, March to August 2026:

The median of each seller’s own typical deposit is 50.0%.

Which looks like a resounding confirmation, until you look at the spread.

Seller medians run from 8.0% to 87.9%. Only 14 of the 63 deposits fell anywhere between 45% and 55%. Pooling all 63 deposits regardless of who took them gives 55.6%, with quartiles at 42.3% and 73.0% — but two sellers account for 37 of the 63, which is exactly why the per-seller figure above is the fairer one to quote.

The variation inside a single business is just as wide. The seller with the most deposits in the data took 19 of them, ranging from 2.6% to 71.8% of the order price. That isn’t a deposit policy. That’s a negotiation, order by order.

One more thing worth knowing: only 63 of the 154 priced orders with any payment recorded started with a deposit at all. The other 91 were paid in full at the first payment.

This is a small dataset from a young product, and it’s published in full with its limits. A seller who takes a deposit in cash and never records it is invisible to it. Treat it as the first real measurement of a question everyone answers from memory, not as a market benchmark.

So: 50% is a decent average and a terrible rule.

What is a deposit actually for?

The reason the average is useless as guidance is that the right number depends on something the average can’t see — what a cancellation would actually cost you.

Three things usually make up that cost:

Materials you’ve already bought. Fabric cut to size, a commissioned mould, ingredients bought for a specific weekend. Some of it is recoverable, most of it isn’t once work starts.

A date you can no longer sell. If you can only take two orders for a Saturday and you held one for three weeks, a late cancellation costs you the whole slot, not just the materials.

Work already done. Design time, sampling, revisions — usually invisible in a quote and the first thing forgotten when someone pulls out.

A business buying expensive materials upfront for a date-locked event has a genuinely different exposure from one turning work around in a couple of days. Our own data shows a median of 1.7 days from order creation to completion across 120 completed orders — for that kind of turnaround there’s barely a window in which a large deposit is protecting anything.

Work out what you’d actually be out of pocket at the point someone typically cancels. That’s your deposit. It’ll rarely be a round number.

Can you make a deposit non-refundable?

This is where the “50% non-refundable” advice runs into a problem, and it’s the part almost none of those articles mention.

Under EU law, Council Directive 93/13/EEC lists as indicatively unfair any term “permitting the seller or supplier to retain sums paid by the consumer where the latter decides not to conclude or perform the contract, without providing for the consumer to receive compensation of an equivalent amount from the seller or supplier where the latter is the party cancelling the contract.”

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority guidance, updated in July 2026, spells out what that means in practice. Retaining a prepayment is more likely to be fair where the trader keeps “sums that are reasonably needed to cover either their unavoidable net costs or the net loss of profit resulting directly from the default”. On deposits specifically, at paragraph 6.62:

A genuine deposit may legitimately be kept in full as long as it operates as a binding reservation and the trader makes clear to the consumer at the earliest opportunity that a deposit is required, and the precise circumstances in which it would be non-refundable. Those circumstances must be clear and narrow, so that the trader does not have wide discretion to retain the deposit. But such a deposit will not normally be more than a small percentage of the price. A larger prepayment is more likely to be unfair as it may amount to a disguised penalty.

Read those together and the popular advice inverts. Taking 50% upfront is fine. Automatically keeping all of it regardless of what you’d actually spent is the exposed part — that’s a larger prepayment, and you can generally retain it only to the extent it covers real losses. The thing you can keep outright is a genuine deposit, and the regulator’s view is that one is normally small.

Writing “non-refundable” on your form doesn’t settle it. What helps is saying upfront that a deposit is required, and stating the narrow circumstances in which you keep it.

This is UK and EU law, and I’m a founder rather than a lawyer — this isn’t legal advice. But the underlying principle, that a retained deposit should reflect real loss rather than punish the customer, is the common thread across consumer regimes, and it’s a sound way to set the number regardless of where you trade.

Where deposits actually get collected

Worth knowing before you plan around a tool: taking a deposit is a bolt-on almost everywhere.

Square Invoices handles it natively — you can request a deposit as a percentage or a fixed amount and split the remaining balance across a payment schedule.

Shopify is more restrictive than most people expect. Collecting and recording partial payments runs through draft orders with payment terms, and Shopify’s own documentation states the feature “is available to stores on the Shopify Plus plan”. For a solo seller taking a handful of custom orders a month, the deposit workflow sits behind the enterprise tier.

Which is why most small sellers do the obvious thing: take the deposit by bank transfer or whatever they already use, and record it against the order manually. That works fine. The failure isn’t in collecting it.

The balance is the part that goes missing

Deposits get taken. Balances get forgotten — because nothing forces the question. The deposit has a natural moment attached to it, the conversation where you agree the order. The balance’s moment is handover, when you’re focused on getting the thing right and asking for money feels awkward.

In our order data, 39 of the 214 orders with any payment recorded were settled in more than one instalment, and 46 orders sat part-paid at any given moment. That’s a meaningful share of a small seller’s revenue living in a state that a “paid?” checkbox can’t describe.

Whatever you track orders in needs three states, not two: unpaid, part-paid, settled — with the outstanding amount visible per order. That’s the whole fix. Collection stops depending on you remembering at the counter.

WISMO records advance, partial and full payments per order and shows the outstanding balance on the customer’s tracking page alongside the status, so the number is in front of both of you before handover. If you just want to work out the split, there’s a free advance payment calculator.

So how much should you take?

Skip the round number and answer three questions:

1. What have I spent by the time someone typically cancels? Materials, deposits to your own suppliers, hours already worked.
2. Can I resell the slot? If the date is the product, your exposure is much larger than materials.
3. Have I said so clearly, upfront? A deposit you explained at the point of order is enforceable in a way that one discovered in your terms afterwards isn’t.

Then set the deposit to cover that, tell the customer what it covers, and record it against the order along with what’s outstanding.

If it lands near 50%, fine — that’s where a lot of sellers end up. Just get there by working it out rather than by copying it, because the sellers in our data who look most confident about their number are the ones whose number isn’t 50%.

For the wider workflow this sits inside, the small business order management guide covers all four stages, and managing custom cake orders works through the capture-to-handover sequence for a date-driven trade.