You have now sold your first goods, or you are about to, so this is the perfect moment to talk money honestly. Here is a fact worth saying plainly up front, because it shapes everything: buyers pay only the asking price, but a seller gives up a small cut of the proceeds. The whole cost of running the market falls on the seller, never the buyer. That is why buying felt so clean, and it is why pricing your own listings takes a little thought. The good news is the sell form shows you the fees before you confirm, so you will never be surprised, and the cut is always small.
The exact fees depend on which market you sold on, so let us take the three cases one at a time. There are only three, and they are easy to keep straight.
The three fee cases
- On a local sale: a sale tax goes to your country's treasury. It is usually 10%, though each country sets its own rate, so yours may differ. On top of that, 10% goes to the player who referred you, if anyone did.
- On a global (gold) sale: 10% goes to the game fund, plus another 10% to your referer, if you have one.
- On game shares: a lighter split applies. Just 5% to the game fund and 5% to your referer.
A worked example
Let us put real numbers on it so it stops being abstract. Imagine you sell 100 units at 5 local each. The sale is worth 500 in local currency before anything is taken. Now apply a 10% local sale tax: that is 50, which goes to your country's treasury, leaving 450. If a player referred you when you signed up, a further 10% referer cut of the original 500, another 50, comes out too, and you would keep 400. If nobody referred you, that second slice simply never happens and you keep the full 450. Either way, the rest lands in your balance the instant your offer sells.
That last point about the referer is important enough to say again clearly, because it confuses people. The referer cut only exists if someone referred you when you first signed up. If no one did, that slice is not taken at all; it does not go to the game or to anyone. So depending on your account, a local sale costs you either just the country tax, or the country tax plus the referer cut. Check your own sell form and it will tell you the truth for your situation.
It helps to understand why these cuts exist at all, rather than just resenting them. The country tax is the lifeblood of your nation: it funds the shared things your country pays for, and one day, if you ever take part in running a country, you will be glad that every local sale quietly feeds the treasury. The referer cut is a thank-you to whoever brought you into the game, a small reward for growing the community, and if you go on to refer friends yourself you will be on the receiving end of exactly that kindness. So the fees are not the game nibbling at you for no reason; they are the threads that tie players, countries and newcomers together, and they are always small enough to leave you comfortably ahead when you price with any sense.
The global and share cases follow the very same pattern, just with different numbers. Sell 100 units globally at 0.01 gold each and the sale is worth 1 gold before fees. The game fund takes its 10%, which is 0.1 gold, and if you have a referer they take another 10%, a further 0.1 gold, so you keep 0.8 gold with a referer or 0.9 gold without. Shares are the gentlest of all: there the game fund takes only 5% and the referer only 5%, so a share sale keeps more of the proceeds in your pocket than a goods sale does. Whichever market you are on, the shape is identical: the buyer pays the sticker price, and a small slice of that comes off your side before the rest reaches you.
Why this changes how you price
Here is the practical lesson hidden in all those percentages. Because the seller carries the fees, you cannot simply sell at the price you paid and break even, you would actually come out behind. You need to sell a little above what you paid just to cover the cut, and a bit more on top to make any real profit. If you bought wood at 5 and the fees on your sale come to 10%, then selling back at 5 would leave you with only about 4.5, a quiet loss. Aim higher than your cost, every time.
New players sometimes feel a flash of unfairness here, as though the fees are a penalty for selling, but it is gentler than it looks once you reframe it. The fee is not a fine; it is simply part of the cost of doing business, exactly like the cost of the wood you bought or the time your workshop spent refining it. A real shopkeeper does not sell goods for precisely what they paid the supplier; they mark them up to cover their overheads and still earn a living. You are doing the very same thing, and the fee is just one of your overheads. Build it into your price the way a shopkeeper builds in the rent, and it stops feeling like a loss and starts feeling like the ordinary arithmetic of running a profitable little business.
None of this needs to be done in your head, though. Everything left after fees is paid to you the moment your offer sells, and the sell form's estimate shows exactly what will land in your balance before you ever confirm. So treat the fees as a gentle nudge to always leave yourself a margin, not as something to fear. In the next lesson we will read the numbers on a product page, which is how you find a price that clears that margin comfortably.
Build in a margin
A simple habit beats fancy math: when you sell, always ask a bit more than you paid, enough to swallow the fees and still come out ahead. The sell form does the arithmetic for you and shows the exact figure that will reach your balance, so use that estimate as your guide every single time.