Free to sell is not free. It's billed to the other side

On October 16, 2026 I published a video on how Vinted makes money with zero seller fees. It walks through the numbers. This memo is about the part the numbers don't show, which is that a buyer fee is a marketing decision before it's a revenue line. Who you bill changes who you can recruit.

Every marketplace launch is a supply problem. You need the first ten sellers, and they're not waiting for you. They're selling somewhere already, and in most of the niches I see, "somewhere" is a place where selling costs nothing. A Facebook group. A Discord. Classifieds. The comments under a post.

Go to those sellers with "we take 10%" and you've handed them their reason to stay put. They don't pay 10% today. They pay nothing, they just do it in DMs.

Go to them with "list for free, keep the full price, and the buyer pays a small protection fee" and the objection is gone. Not reduced, gone. That's the whole pitch, and it's why Vinted could pull sellers out of eBay and local classifieds at the scale it did. The seller's price is the seller's money.

I watched this happen on a Danish knitting marketplace this autumn. The designers came out of two Facebook groups where they'd never paid a fee in their lives. The owner's first instinct was 10% from the seller, like everyone. She launched with 5% from the seller and 5% from the buyer plus a small fixed amount, labelled "Køberbeskyttelse", buyer protection. Twenty-one designers listed within weeks. The conversation with each of them was "it's 5%", and 5% is a number a Facebook seller can live with.

The worry is always the buyer side. Won't a fee at checkout kill conversion?

Look at what buyers already accept. Vinted charges a fixed $0.70 plus 5% of the item price in the US, mandatory, on every purchase. Depop removed its 10% selling fee for UK sellers on March 20, 2024 and started charging UK buyers a marketplace fee of up to 5% plus up to £1 from April 15, 2024. Airbnb, StubHub, Fiverr, Ticketmaster, every ticketing site you've ever used. The buyer-pays line is normal now. Buyers compare your fee to those, not to zero.

What they do react to is the name and the timing.

Call it "service fee" and it reads as a tax. Call it "buyer protection" and it reads as a feature, because it tells the buyer what they get. Vinted's version says, in its own words, that it covers a refund if the item is lost, damaged or not as described, secure payment and support. That sentence does a lot of work. It turns a line item into a reason to buy here rather than in the Facebook group, where nobody refunds anything.

Timing is the other half. A fee that first appears on the payment page is a surprise, and surprises are where carts die. A fee shown on the listing, next to the price, with a small (i) that says what it's for, is just part of the price. The buyer decided with the full number in front of them.

The Danish marketplace's 5 and 5 is not a compromise. It's the strongest version of the pitch, for a reason that's slightly embarrassing once you see it.

Nobody sees 10%.

The seller sees 5%, which is less than Etsy's 6.5% plus listing fees plus payment fees, so the seller feels looked after. The buyer sees 5% plus a fixed amount, which is Vinted's shape, so the buyer feels at home. The marketplace takes the same money it would have taken with a 10% seller commission, and both sides walked in comparing it to a bigger number.

That's the marketing. Not a trick, both sides got the honest figure. But each side was shown the figure they compare, against the thing they compare it to.

One detail from Vinted that most founders skip. The 70 cents.

On a $100 item the fee is $5.70, under 6%. On a $5 item it's 95 cents, which is 19% of the price. A plain percentage earns almost nothing on cheap items, and cheap items are most of the volume on a secondhand or hobby marketplace. The fixed part is what makes those categories pay for their own card fees and support. Depop's "up to £1" does the same job. If your average item is under $20, you need one.

Don't copy Vinted's number. Run their exact US rate on a $20 item through normal card fees and the marketplace keeps about 77 cents. Vinted makes that work at Vinted's volume. Copy the model, set your own rate.

The seller's payout must not move. A seller who gets $40 without the fee gets $40 with it. The card cost of the fee comes out of the fee, never out of the seller. The moment a seller's payout drops because you added a buyer fee, the "free to sell" pitch is a lie and they'll find out on their first sale.

Name it for what it does. If you call it buyer protection, something has to be protected. Vinted refunds lost and damaged items. A whisky marketplace I work with charges 3% only on orders above £500 and spends it on per-parcel insurance, with the shipping label held until the owner has looked at the order. The fee pays for the promise. A protection fee that protects nothing is a service fee with a better name, and buyers work that out around the second order.

If your first sellers come from a place where selling is free, a group, classifieds, a forum, launch free to sell and bill the buyer. You're removing the only objection they have.

If your first sellers come from Etsy or eBay and are used to paying, split it. 5 and 5, with a fixed part if your items are cheap. Each side sees a smaller number than the one they left.

Either way, show the fee on the listing, not at the end, and give it a name you can back.

The settings for this are in the Prometora payment docs, and the revenue calculator lets you run seller-pays, buyer-pays and the split side by side with your own numbers.

Rasmus