Online Marketplace Examples and the Commission Each One Charges Sellers (2026)

A marketplace makes its money from other people's stock. Sellers list their own goods, buyers pay through the site, and the site keeps a share of each sale. That share runs from 5% to 50% on the seven sites below, and the reasons for the gap tell you more about running one than any homepage does.

Reverb is the one name most readers will know. The other six are smaller sites built around one kind of seller, from UK jewellery makers and painters to furniture dealers, hockey players, fruit farmers and wholesale brands. We opened and checked all seven on 3 October 2026, and every fee comes from the site's own seller page or help centre.

Etsy was on the first list. It showed our browser an "Access is temporarily restricted" page, so Folksy, a smaller UK handmade market, takes its place.

At a glance

Reverb

Reverb sells new and second-hand musical instruments and audio gear. On its UK version, electric guitars alone came to 70,544 results. The filter row covers condition, category, brand, price and deals. Every card states the condition in words, such as Second-hand, Excellent, and shows the country the guitar ships from.

Selling costs nothing until something sells. Then Reverb takes 5% of the total, shipping included, with a minimum fee of 50 cents or 50p and a cap of $500 or £500. A separate payment processing fee applies on top, which is 3.19% plus 0.49 in the US, Canada and the EU. Both come straight out of the seller's payout.

Bump is the paid extra. A seller picks a rate between 1% and 30% of the sale price, and Reverb uses it to push the listing up in search, on product pages and on the homepage. The rate is only charged if the item sells. In our screenshot the same ESP guitar sits twice in the first row, once as a plain result and once labelled Reverb Bump.

Folksy

Folksy's own footer calls it "The UK alternative to Etsy". Only UK-based makers can open a shop, and they have to sell original, handmade or designed work or craft supplies. The selling page claims more than 10,000 makers and over 2 million items sold.

Earrings alone held 11,451 items. You can set a price range and a country you want delivery to, then narrow by type, with a count next to each. The first item we opened was a £6.50 pair of polymer clay cat earrings. Its page gave the maker's town, the materials, "Only 2 available", £1.95 UK delivery with dispatch inside three days, and a delivery table that ruled out the EU, the US and the rest of the world. A small PLUS badge sat next to the shop name.

That badge is the second of two plans. Basic costs 15p plus VAT per listing and has no monthly fee. Plus costs £7.50 a month or £75 a year, makes listing free and doubles the photos per item from five to ten. Both plans pay the same 6% plus VAT commission on each sale.

Artfinder

Artfinder sells original paintings, prints, photos and sculpture straight from independent artists. Artists have to apply, and the site says a decision can take up to two weeks. The paintings page says more than 5,000 new originals go up every month. Its filters match how people buy art for a wall, with size bands in centimetres, landscape, portrait or square, price bands, subject and a "Framed or ready to hang" option.

We opened an 81 by 100 cm acrylic landscape priced at £814.32. The page listed £85.72 shipping to the UK, dispatch from Spain within ten working days, free returns, a Make an Offer button, a View In Room preview and 196 reviews of the artist.

The commission is the highest of the seven. On the free Starter plan Artfinder keeps 50% of each sale. Core costs £10 a month and drops it to 45%, and Premium costs £30 a month for 40%. The plans also cap listings at 30, 200 and 600. Artists can pay £99 for a homepage spot or a slot in a marketing email, or £79.20 on Premium. The plans page says every plan includes optional managed shipping and marketing support, and claims 1 million visitors a month.

Vinterior

Vinterior is a site for second-hand furniture, from antiques to mid-century pieces, plus lighting, rugs and art. The furniture section counted 133,724 pieces when we looked. Open the filters and you can pick the country a piece ships from, with the UK, Italy, France, Belgium and the Netherlands at the top, then period, designer, condition, main material, city and exact dimensions. The first card in our session was marked Sponsored listing.

It has two kinds of seller and two prices. A professional dealer pays 17% on the first £2,500 of each item and 10% on anything above that. A private seller pays a flat 24%. There are no monthly or listing fees. Every piece goes past a review team before buyers see it, and the seller is paid once the item arrives safely. The sell page claims over 5,000 sellers and more than half a million shoppers a month.

For a sideboard or a wardrobe, the seller can use Vinterior's delivery service or send the piece themselves.

SidelineSwap

SidelineSwap is a North American site for new and used sports gear, from hockey and lacrosse to golf. Hockey sticks alone returned 19,436 results. The filters come straight from the sport. You can pick age group, left or right hand, flex, stick length, pro stock or retail, new or used, and the seller's region of the US or Canada.

The item page we opened was a two-pack of pro stock Bauer sticks for $449, sold by ProSourceHockey, which had 99.7% positive feedback from 2,485 ratings. Buyers can pay at once, add to cart or make an offer, and there's an estimated delivery window. The most useful line sat above the title. "Have one to sell?" it asked, and said sticks of that model usually sell for $106.25 to $330. That's a seller signup pitch built into every product page.

Listing is free. The fee is 12% for a seller's first five sales and 10% from the sixth, with a minimum of $1.99 and a cap of $100. Payment processing adds 2.9% plus 30 cents. If an item sells within a week of the seller bumping it, another 3% applies.

CrowdFarming

CrowdFarming lets farms sell fruit, vegetables, olive oil and pantry goods straight to households. Buyers can order one box, subscribe, or adopt a tree or plant for a season and get its harvest. The fruits section had 413 products. Each card shows a photo of the farmer, the next shipping date, which was 10 October for most of them, and the price per kilo. Quick filters pick out adoptions, women farmers and farms converting to regenerative methods.

Product pages read like a farm profile. The mango page we opened belongs to Laderas de Granada in Motril, Spain. It's been listed since April 2023 and shows 8.5k active adoptions and 3.4k positive ratings, a month-by-month harvest calendar and a note that the fruit is picked to order the day before it ships. A one-off 2.5 kg box was £19.89.

The farmer sets the base price, and CrowdFarming adds its services and VAT on top. Its help centre publishes the split. After VAT, 50% goes to the farmer, 25% to the carrier, 22% to CrowdFarming and 3% to payment fees. The 22% is a yearly average. On adoptions the margin is 16%, and on single boxes it can reach 32%.

Creoate

Creoate is a wholesale marketplace. Independent brands sell stock to shops, and the buyer is a retailer who will mark it up. The site says it has over 6,500 brands and more than 250,000 trade buyers. Home and Garden alone showed 45,190 products. None of the cards we saw showed a price. Each one says "Register to see price", with the brand, its country and its minimum order, usually £75 or £100.

Besides country and rating, shop owners can filter by wholesale price, minimum order value, lead time and profit margin.

Brands pay no joining, monthly or listing fee. Creoate takes 20% of a retailer's first order with a brand and 15% of reorders, before VAT. Orders from a brand's existing stockists placed through Creoate carry no commission at all. Creoate also pays for shipping, so the brand only books a collection and prints labels. Brands are paid within 30 days of sending an order, while retailers get 60 days to pay.

Build your own

Lay the seven side by side and the same parts show up. Sellers list for free or for pennies, and the site earns when something sells. Each search page has at least one filter that only makes sense in its niche, like hand and flex for hockey sticks, period for furniture, orientation for paintings or minimum order for wholesale. Item pages say who is selling, where it ships from, what condition or materials it's in and how long it takes to arrive. Most sites sell one more thing on top of commission, such as Bump on Reverb, sponsored listings on Vinterior or homepage spots on Artfinder.

The size of the cut follows the work the site does. Reverb and Folksy mostly host the listing and take the payment, for 5% and 6% plus VAT. Vinterior, CrowdFarming and Artfinder vet sellers, arrange delivery or market the stock, and take roughly 16% to 50%.

Copying that on WordPress means picking between two setups.

The common one is WooCommerce plus a multi-vendor plugin. Dokan Lite has more than 30,000 active installs on WordPress.org and was updated on 30 September 2026. WCFM Marketplace has more than 10,000 and was last updated on 30 August 2026, and it also needs the WCFM Frontend Manager plugin. Both run on WooCommerce, so you also choose a theme and a payment extension. We've already compared them in Dokan vs WCFM for an Etsy-style site, so that's not repeated here.

The other setup is a theme with the marketplace built in, with no WooCommerce underneath.

That's what we sell as the Marketplace Theme. In the released 12.0.66 build, members choose to shop or to sell at sign-up. Sellers apply with a shop name, a short description and three photos of their work, and you approve them by hand unless you switch that to automatic. Each approved seller gets a shop page with ratings, policies and a vacation mode. Buyers fill one basket from several shops and pay once, and the order then splits so each shop ships its own part with tracking.

Commission is a percentage, with an optional flat fee per item, and starts at 10%. You can change it per category, per seller or per product, and it's never taken from shipping. You can also sell seller plans that cap how many products a shop can have live and carry their own commission rate, much like Artfinder's tiers. Sellers can pay a weekly fee to feature their shop.

Seller payouts are switched on for this theme. A sale is held for 14 days after it ships by default, longer if a refund request is open, and then the seller's share moves into their balance. Sellers ask to withdraw by PayPal, bank transfer or Wise. You send the money yourself and mark it paid. There's no automatic split like Stripe Connect, so every payment lands in your account first and you're the merchant of record for tax.

Search has no condition filter, even though listings carry a condition, and there's no search by distance. There's nothing like Bump or sponsored products in search, and the featured shop only shows on 20 of the 33 homepage designs. Shipping zones are domestic, Europe and world. Stripe and PayPal are separate plugins. The licence is $99 once for unlimited sites you own, with six months of updates and then $49 for each six months after.

Final thoughts

For a first marketplace with no money for staff, study Folksy and SidelineSwap. Folksy shows how far a small cut and a cheap plan can go when sellers do their own posting. SidelineSwap shows how to win sellers with price data and a rate that falls as they sell more.

If you plan to vet every seller or handle delivery, look at Vinterior and Artfinder. Both charge more because they do more, and both use a second rate or a monthly plan to keep their best sellers.

CrowdFarming is the one to read if trust is your main problem. It's the only one of the seven that shows where the rest of the money goes, carrier and card fees included.

Creoate suits anyone selling to businesses. Its zero rate on a brand's own stockists is the cleverest pricing idea here. Reverb is the long-term picture, where search ranking itself becomes a product sellers pay for.

FAQ

Sources

• Reverb help centre: selling fees, payment processing fee and Bump.
• Folksy selling page and plans.
• Artfinder sell page and seller plan subscriptions.
• Vinterior selling page.
• SidelineSwap seller fees.
• CrowdFarming economic transparency FAQ.
• Creoate join as a brand page.
• WordPress.org: Dokan Lite and WCFM Marketplace, with installs and update dates from the WordPress.org plugins API.
• PremiumPress Marketplace Theme. Features are described from the released 12.0.66 build.

Checked on 3 October 2026.