Charging sellers a listing fee

By default, your community's marketplace is free — anyone can post a listing without paying. If you want to charge a small fee per listing to discourage low-effort posts or fund hosting costs, Mobieus gives you three modes to pick from.

The fee is charged to the seller, into your own Stripe account. Mobieus is not on the payment path; we only render the form and call Stripe with your keys. Refunds, dispute handling, and anything else commerce-related all happen in your Stripe dashboard.

Before you start

Two things must be in place before a paid fee model will save:

• Your plan must include marketplace selling fees. This is bundled with Creator Plus and Sovereign. On a plan without it, the fee screen accepts only the "Off" mode. If you try to save Flat or Sliding and it's rejected, your plan is the reason — contact support to confirm your entitlement.
• Your Stripe keys must be connected. Set up Stripe first from your community's Stripe settings. The fee flow won't work until at least your sandbox keys are saved and validated.

Fee models

Pick one in Admin → mobieusMarket → Listing fees.

• Off (default). No fee. Listings are free for sellers and the create form skips the payment step entirely.
• Flat. The same fee in cents on every listing regardless of price. Good for low-volume curated marketplaces — a $5 part and a $5,000 motherboard pay the same fee.
• Sliding. Tiers based on the listing's asking price. Useful when you want a $0.50 fee on a $10 part but $5 on a $1,000 part.

Flat model

Enter the fee in cents. 50 = $0.50, 500 = $5.00. Save.

Sliding model

You write a JSON array of tiers. Each tier has:

• max_price_cents — the upper bound of the tier in cents, or null for "everything beyond the previous tier."
• fee_cents — the fee charged when a listing's price falls in that tier.

[
  { "max_price_cents": 500000,  "fee_cents": 50  },
  { "max_price_cents": 5000000, "fee_cents": 200 },
  { "max_price_cents": null,    "fee_cents": 500 }
]

This says: listings up to $5,000 pay $0.50, listings up to $50,000 pay $2.00, listings over $50,000 pay $5.00. Mobieus normalises the tiers on save (sorts them, dedupes the open-ended one), so the order you type them in doesn't matter.

Per-category override

On any category's edit page (Admin → mobieusMarket → Categories → edit), the Listing-fee override field overrides the marketplace-wide model for listings in that category. Useful when:

• You want a "Featured" category with a higher fee.
• You want a "Free items" category that's exempt from a flat fee.

Leave blank to inherit the global model.

Explainer text

The "Why am I being charged?" textarea on the fee config page shows to the seller on the create form. Plain text, up to 2,000 characters. Two sentences is plenty. Empty by default.

What sellers see

When a fee model is on, the listing-create form gains a "Listing fee" panel. It shows:

• The fee Mobieus computed for the listing's price and category.
• Your explainer text, if you wrote one.
• A Stripe-hosted card field where the seller enters their card.

When the seller clicks "Post listing," Stripe charges them. On success, the listing is created with the fee tracked. On failure, the listing is not created and the seller sees Stripe's error message inline.

Refunds

Mobieus does not auto-refund anything. If you remove a listing for policy reasons, refund the seller manually from your Stripe dashboard if you choose. The "no auto-refund" rule is intentional: auto-refunding a withdrawn listing would let someone post, keep the listing live for hours, withdraw, and still get refunded.

Auditing

Your audit log records every fee-config change and the fee charged on each listing. Your Stripe dashboard is the source of truth for actual money movement.

Related Pages