What it costs to sell here

To put your first product up, we need exactly one thing: a way for customers to pay you. A Zelle email or a Venmo username is enough, and that is the entire setup. We do not ask for an SSN, a business name, a card on file or a Stripe account — for most neighborhood shop owners that paperwork is the reason they never open a shop at all.

Taking card payments is optional and separate. Cards run through Stripe, and Stripe has to verify who you are before it is allowed to move money into your bank account — that is the law it operates under, not a hurdle we added. You can skip it and sell on Zelle and Venmo alone, and you can turn it on later without changing anything you have already listed.

Nothing is charged for simply having a shop open. No monthly fee, no listing fee, no fee for taking a product back down, no fee for a quiet month. Commission exists only on orders you actually sold.

We take 10% of the order total. A $60 basket costs you $6.

The percentage stops at $10. A $250 order would be $25 at 10% — you pay $10, not $25. However big a single order gets, the commission on it never goes past $10.

Why we cap it: the big order is exactly the one a shop owner is most tempted to settle privately, off the site. We would much rather keep the order — and the repeat customer, the review and the delivery record that come with it — than collect a few more dollars on it once. The cap is there so the fee is never the reason to take a sale somewhere else.

The same rate and the same cap apply whether the customer paid by card or by Zelle or Venmo. What differs between the two is only when and how the commission reaches us.

On a card order the money passes through everygrocer on its way to you, so the commission is taken out at the moment the customer pays. You do nothing, you never get a separate bill for it, and you cannot fall behind on it.

Card payments also cost 2.9% + 30¢ per order. That is Stripe’s price. everygrocer keeps none of it and does not mark it up — it is a cost we pass on, not a fee we earn.

You would pay the same on a card terminal in your own shop. The one difference here is that everygrocer is the merchant of record — the charge on the customer’s statement reads "everygrocer" — so Stripe bills the platform, and the platform deducts that same amount from the order before paying you.

A worked $60 card order, end to end: commission $6, card processing $2.04, platform fee $8.04 in total. $51.96 reaches you.

On a refund, Stripe keeps the processing fee it already took — that money is gone for both of us. So a refund gives back the commission on the refunded amount and not the card cost, exactly like a refund on your own terminal.

When a customer pays you by Zelle or Venmo, the money goes straight from them to you. everygrocer never touches it. That is why those orders carry no card processing cost at all — and also why we cannot take the commission out of the payment, because there is no payment of ours to take it out of.

Commission still applies, at the same 10% and the same $10 cap. Instead of being deducted, it is added up as a balance you owe, and settled afterwards in one of two ways. If you have saved a card in your shop settings, we charge the balance to that card automatically, once a month, and email you exactly which orders the charge covered. If you have not saved a card — you were never required to — the balance sits in your shop dashboard and you clear it yourself with the settle button, whenever you like.

Only orders you have confirmed as received are counted. An offline order still waiting for the transfer to arrive is never billed to you — you should not be fronting commission on money that has not reached you.

There are two lines, and crossing either one pauses your shop: owing more than $50 in total, or leaving your oldest unpaid commission unsettled for more than 14 days. Both are judged on their own — a small balance left for 14 days pauses the shop just as a large one does within a day.

While your shop is paused, your products stop showing in the market and you cannot take new orders. Orders you already have are not affected: you still hand them over and you still keep that money.

Settling clears it. The moment the balance is paid, your products go back up on their own — there is nothing to apply for and nobody to email.

Why it works this way: on a Zelle or Venmo order the platform never handled a cent, so there is nothing to deduct the commission from, and if you never saved a card there is nothing to charge either. Pausing the shop is the only thing left. It is also what makes the open door possible — because our exposure to any one shop stops at $50, we can afford to ask you for nothing up front.

None of this should ever arrive as a surprise: your shop dashboard shows what you owe, which orders it covers and how long the oldest one has been outstanding, at any moment.

10% and the $10 cap are what every new shop starts on. We can agree a different rate or cap with an individual shop owner, so treat your own shop settings page as the authority: the rate and cap shown there are the ones actually on your account, and they are what your orders are billed at.

A rate applies from the moment an order is placed. If your rate or cap changes later, orders already placed keep the terms they were placed under — nothing is recalculated backwards.

Write to support@everygrocer.com with the order number and we will walk you through the arithmetic on that specific order. Every order in your shop dashboard already shows its commission and card processing cost separately, so the two are never mixed together.