Fees & payments
Listing a book on retale is free. There's no charge to browse, no charge to message, and no charge if your book doesn't sell.
The retale fee is 60p plus 5% of the book price.
Paid by the buyer, shown itemised at checkout before you confirm, never added afterwards. It covers using retale, including Buyer Protection: the seller isn’t paid until you’ve confirmed the book’s arrived, and if something’s genuinely wrong, we step in.
What buyers pay
Three things, itemised at checkout before you confirm: the price the seller set, the cost of getting the book to you, and the retale fee. Nothing is added after you’ve seen the total.
The fee is a small fixed amount plus a small percentage of the book price, rather than a flat percentage with a minimum charge, because a minimum charge quietly becomes a very high rate on cheap books. This way the percentage you pay only ever goes down as the price goes up.
How postage is priced
Sellers don’t set postage prices. They choose which delivery options they can offer, and retale works out the cost from a live courier quote for tracked delivery. That means postage is what postage actually costs, and can’t be inflated to pad a listing.
Local collection is always free. For tracked delivery, the quoted price includes the small per-label cost retale pays to buy the label, and part of the VAT on it, so what you see is genuinely what you pay.
What sellers receive
You receive the full price you set. The retale fee is paid by the buyer on top; it isn’t taken out of your side.
For tracked delivery, retale buys and pays for the label using what the buyer’s charged for delivery, so there’s nothing to pay or arrange on the postage side. You just print the label (or show a QR code at a Post Office) and hand the parcel over.
When sellers get paid
retale sells your book as your agent: the buyer pays retale on your behalf, and we hold your money for you until the sale is complete. That’s when the buyer confirms the book arrived, or, for a local collection, 48 hours after their code is entered at the meet-up. It’s then sent to your payout account with Stripe, our payment partner, which pays it into your bank, usually within 1–2 working days. Stripe only pays out once you have at least £1 to come, so a small sale waits, safely, until there is. There’s no fee for this.
If a buyer doesn’t respond, the money is released 48 hours after delivery rather than being held indefinitely. If something’s genuinely gone wrong, either side can raise an issue and we’ll look into it before any money moves.