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.
During early access, retale charges no fee at all.
Buyers pay the item price and postage, and nothing else. When we do introduce a fee, everyone using retale will be told directly before it applies to anything — it won’t appear without warning.
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 (once introduced) the retale fee. Nothing is added after you’ve seen the total.
The fee will be a small fixed amount plus a small percentage of the item price — deliberately shaped that way rather than a flat percentage with a minimum charge, because a minimum charge quietly becomes a very high effective 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 actually offer, and retale works out the cost — from the book’s size and weight for standard post, or 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 — so what you see is genuinely what you pay, with nothing added afterwards.
What sellers receive
For local collection and standard post, you receive the full price you set, plus the postage — because you’re the one buying the stamp. Any retale fee is paid by the buyer on top; it isn’t taken out of your side.
For tracked delivery it works slightly differently: retale buys and pays for the label, so you receive the item price only and pay nothing for postage yourself. You just print the label (or show a QR code at a Post Office) and hand the parcel over.
When sellers get paid
Money is held by retale until the sale is genuinely complete — when the buyer confirms the book arrived, or, for a local collection, the moment their code is entered at the meet-up. It then lands in your retale wallet, and you can withdraw it to your bank or spend it on other books.
If a buyer doesn’t respond, funds release automatically after a set period 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.