Offerup Fees

What are OfferUp's fees for sellers?

Last updated: August 2026

Bottom line: local pickup sales are free, and shipped sales carry a service fee around 12.9% with a minimum near $1.99 — so a $60 shipped item costs roughly $7.74 while the same item sold locally costs nothing. That split is the single most important thing to understand about offerup fees.

The comparison against dedicated resale platforms is favorable but not dramatic. A $60 item costs about $8.25 on eBay and $12 on Poshmark's flat 20%, against roughly $7.74 here for a shipped order.

The genuine advantage is the free local lane, which no shipping-based marketplace can match — and which costs you time rather than money.

Where the other charges hide

Promotions are the second line. Bumps and promoted placement are optional paid features, and sellers who use them habitually should count that spend as part of their real cost per sale.

A seller spending $20 a month promoting listings on $600 of sales has added more than three points to their effective rate, which is invisible unless you total it deliberately.

Shipping is the third and largest. On shipped orders you're generally covering the label unless it's priced into the item, so a $9 to $14 parcel cost dwarfs the service fee on anything under about $80.

Sellers comparing offerup fees against other platforms on percentage alone consistently miss this, then wonder where the margin went on a $35 sale that cost $4.52 in fees and $11 in postage.

Buyers carry a charge on shipped orders as well, which affects how your price reads at checkout even though it never touches your payout. A $60 listing shows the buyer something above $60 once their service charge and shipping are added, and that total is what they compare against a competing listing elsewhere.

Sellers who price to the listing number rather than the checkout number lose sales they never see, and the fix is simply to check your own listing as a buyer would once in a while.

There's no subscription, no listing fee and no monthly minimum, which is worth stating plainly because it makes the platform cheap to test. You can post twenty items, sell four locally, and have paid nothing at all — a fairly unusual arrangement among marketplaces of any size.

How to price an item so the fees don't eat it

Bottom line: eight steps, about two minutes per listing, and they keep a $35 item from netting $19 — which is what happens when a seller prices for the listing page instead of for the payout.

1. Weigh and measure the item first. A bulky $35 piece with a $14 label should be local-only, and you cannot know that after the sale.
2. Decide the lane deliberately: local, shipped, or both. Local avoids offerup fees entirely and costs you a meetup; shipped costs roughly 12.9% plus the label and saves the trip.
3. Set your floor as a net figure. If you need $28 in hand on a shipped item, work backwards through the fee and the label — that's a listing near $50, not $35.
4. Add a 15% negotiation buffer on top of the floor. This is a haggling marketplace, and a seller who lists at their true minimum has nowhere to move.
5. Check comparable sold prices before committing. Local buyers here skew price-led, so a piece clearing $120 on a dedicated resale platform may need to sit near $85 in a local feed.
6. Decide about promotion honestly. A $2 bump on a $30 item is nearly 7% of the sale, so treat promotion spend as part of your offerup fees rather than as marketing that lives in a separate mental budget.
7. Photograph in daylight against a plain background. Costs nothing, and it's the difference between a listing that sells in two days and one that sits three weeks accruing promotion spend.
8. If you sell on other channels, confirm you can delist within minutes. A double sale on a $200 item costs more than a year of offerup fees on a typical shop.

Once the list is habitual it takes under two minutes and most of it happens while you're already handling the item.

The one part worth doing away from the packing table is step five, the comps check — sitting down once a week to price twenty items against recent sales produces better numbers than pricing each one in isolation between other tasks, because you see the pattern across the category rather than guessing item by item.

The step that decides the outcome

Step three, working backwards from net. On a shipped $35 sale, the fee is about $4.52 and the label maybe $11, leaving roughly $19.50 — which for an item that cost you $12 is barely worth the packing.

Sellers who compute this before listing either raise the price, move the item to local pickup, or skip it entirely, and all three of those are better outcomes than discovering the arithmetic afterward. That single habit does more for margin than any comparison of offerup fees against another platform's rate card.

Quick tangent — I use the Closo Wholesale to track what is actually moving right now, which saves me about three hours a week of manual search. Worth a peek before your next haul.

The pitfalls that cost more than the fees

Bottom line: on a typical month a seller loses far more to negotiation, no-shows and unweighed parcels than to the platform's cut — roughly $320 against $120 in offerup fees for a shop doing 40 sales at $60. The fee is the smallest controllable line in the operation. , according to Statista market research

Negotiation leads. This marketplace opens low by convention: a $60 listing routinely draws a $30 offer, and sellers who list at their target price end up conceding from the wrong starting point. Holding an extra $8 per sale through better anchoring is $320 a month at that volume, which is nearly three times what the platform charges.

Anyone studying offerup fees to reduce costs should look at their average concession first, because that's where the money actually goes.

The no-show tax

Second is meetup failure on the local side. Sellers who track it see 15% to 30% of arranged meetups fall through, and each one costs the allocated time plus, often, a buyer who moved on while you waited.

Two habits cut it: require a same-day confirmation message before you leave, and batch meetups into one errand at a fixed public location.

That converts a wasted trip into a partial one, which is the difference between local selling being worth $44 an hour and being worth $15 — and it never appears in any discussion of offerup fees because it isn't a fee at all.

Third is unweighed parcels. A seller listing "shipping available" on a bulky $35 item without checking the label discovers a $16 cost after the sale, and the shipped lane turns a $17 margin into a $1 one. A $25 scale prevents this permanently.

When considering offerup selling, When considering offer up fees, When considering offerup advertising, When considering offerup free, When considering does offerup charge a fee, When considering offerup payments, When considering does offerup charge fees, When considering offerup fee calculator, This is the specific failure that makes a cheap-fee platform feel expensive: the offerup fees on that sale were $4.52, entirely reasonable, and the postage was the problem.

Fourth is message-queue time, which no one prices. Local marketplaces generate a high volume of low-quality inquiries — "is this available" from people who never reply again, lowballs, requests to hold items indefinitely. Forty minutes a day on that traffic is twenty hours a month.

Canned replies, a stated no-holds policy and simply not answering threads that have gone quiet for two days are the practical defenses, and they're worth more per hour than any fee optimization available.

The fifth, for multi-channel sellers, is the double sale. An item that sells here Saturday and stays live on eBay until Monday is exposed for 48 hours, and a cancellation there costs a defect, a buyer and often the ranking on that listing. That single event can exceed a full year of offerup fees for a small shop.

Delisting within minutes rather than at the end of the weekend is the only defense, and it's a discipline rather than a purchase.

A sixth leak deserves naming because it grows quietly: promotion spend that becomes a habit rather than a decision. Bumping a listing feels cheap at $2, and a seller bumping ten items a week has added $80 a month to their cost base — comparable to the platform's entire commission at moderate volume.

Promotion works when it accelerates an item that would have sold anyway or rescues one that's genuinely buried; it doesn't fix a price the market has rejected. Before paying to promote anything, drop the price 10% instead and see whether interest appears. If it does, the item was mispriced rather than invisible, and you've solved the problem for free.

Put together, the picture inverts the usual framing. The published rate is genuinely competitive, and the platform's free local lane is unmatched.

Whether you make money here is decided by anchoring, meetup discipline, a scale, your tolerance for the message queue, and how fast you delist — not by offerup fees, which are simply the smallest and most visible of the numbers involved.

Frequently asked questions about the fees

Bottom line: free locally, about 12.9% shipped with a roughly $1.99 minimum, and everything else — promotions, labels, refunds — is optional or situational., according to U.S. Census Bureau economic data

Is there any charge for listing an item?

No. Listing is free and unlimited in practical terms, with no subscription tier. That makes the platform cheap to test: post twenty items, sell four locally, and you've paid nothing at all. The only money that changes hands is on shipped orders or optional promotion.

Do I pay anything on a local cash sale?

Nothing. The buyer hands you cash, you hand over the item, and no offerup fees apply. That's the platform's clearest advantage over any shipping-based marketplace — and the trade is the meetup, the negotiation and the occasional no-show.

What happens to fees when an order is refunded?

The service fee generally follows the refund, but the outbound label you already bought does not come back. On a $60 shipped order that's roughly $11 of unrecoverable cost per return, which is a good argument for over-describing condition rather than under-describing it.

Are the shipped fees negotiable at volume?

Not for ordinary sellers. There's no published volume tier, so a seller doing 200 shipped orders a month pays the same rate as one doing two. If you need lower rates at scale, the lever is postage — commercial label pricing and zone-aware carrier selection — rather than the platform's commission.

Does the buyer see what I pay?

No. Your service fee is deducted from the payout and never displayed to them; what they see is the item price plus their own charges and shipping. That asymmetry matters for pricing: a $60 listing costs the buyer more than $60 and pays you less than $60, and neither party sees the other's side.

Checking your own listing while logged out is the quickest way to understand what offerup fees do to the number a buyer is actually deciding on.

How do the fees compare with Facebook Marketplace?

Facebook charges 5% on shipped orders and nothing locally, so it's cheaper on the shipped lane; both are free locally. The audience and category mix differ enough that most local sellers list on both rather than choosing, and at that point offerup fees matter less than which platform actually produces buyers in your area for your kind of inventory.

Put the numbers to work this week

Bottom line: split your inventory by a $40 line — below it goes local and free, above it can absorb the roughly 12.9% shipped rate plus a label — and you'll capture most of the available margin without changing anything else.

Start with an audit of last month. Total your shipped sales, the offerup fees on them, and the postage you paid, then compare that against what those same items would have netted through local pickup.

Sellers doing this for the first time usually find a cluster of cheap shipped items that returned under $20 each, and moving those to local-only immediately improves the average. Then buy a scale if you don't have one, because every item priced from an estimated weight is a coin flip.

Then fix the two habits that matter

List 20% above your floor so negotiation has somewhere to go, and require a same-day confirmation before driving to any meetup. Those two behaviors are worth several times what you'll ever save by studying offerup fees, and they cost nothing but consistency.

If you also sell on other channels, add a third: delist within minutes of a sale, because one cancellation on a $200 item exceeds a year of platform charges for most small shops.

The Closo blog hub covers the surrounding decisions in more depth — shipping service selection by weight and zone, pricing ladders for aging inventory, crosslisting workflows and delist speed, and channel comparisons with real seller numbers. If your postage bill looks high relative to your sales, start with the shipping material; that's usually the larger number.

And to state it once more plainly: offerup fees are zero locally and about 12.9% with a roughly $1.99 minimum on shipped orders, which is competitive — the money you keep is decided by your price floor, your postage and your discipline, not by the rate card.