How Much Does Faire Charge? A Complete Guide to Faire Fees

The first thing most makers do when they get accepted onto Faire is feel excited. The second thing they do — once their first order comes through — is stare at the payout and wonder where their money went.

Faire’s fee structure isn’t complicated, but it’s easy to underestimate if you’re used to Etsy or Shopify. The commission rates are higher. The math is different. And if you set your wholesale prices before understanding how Faire takes its cut, you can end up making less per sale than you would selling direct — sometimes significantly less.

This guide covers every fee Faire charges, walks through the actual numbers, and explains how to build those costs into your pricing so you’re not just busy on Faire, but actually profitable.

What Does Faire Charge Brands?

Faire makes its money by charging brands a commission on each sale. There are two main fees to understand:

1. Commission on sales

• 25% commission on each new retailer’s first order
• 15% commission on all repeat orders from that same retailer
• 0% commission on orders from retailers you bring to Faire yourself via your Faire Direct link

2. Transaction fee

• $10 per order regardless of order size or commission rate

That’s it. No monthly listing fee. No subscription required to sell. No separate payment processing fee — Faire bundles that into the commission and transaction fee.

For comparison, here’s how that stacks up against the other channels makers typically use:

Etsy and Shopify look much cheaper because they are — you’re selling retail, to end consumers, at full price. Faire is a wholesale channel. You’re selling at half (or less) of your retail price, to buyers who need margin themselves. The fee structure reflects that entirely different trade-off.

How Faire’s 25% Commission Works in Practice

The 25% rate applies to the first order from each new retailer. Once a retailer has ordered from you once, all future orders drop to 15%.

Let’s run the numbers on a $300 first order:

• Order value: $300
• Faire commission (25%): $75
• Transaction fee: $10
• You receive: $215 (72% of the order value)

Now that same retailer places a repeat order of $300:

• Order value: $300
• Faire commission (15%): $45
• Transaction fee: $10
• You receive: $245 (82% of the order value)

The improvement is real and meaningful. Retailers who reorder regularly become significantly more profitable over time. This is why Faire’s model rewards makers who build relationships with buyers, not just churn through one-off transactions.

What Is Faire Direct — and How Does It Affect Your Fees?

Faire Direct is probably the most underused feature on the platform.

If you have existing wholesale accounts — boutiques you already sell to, people you’ve met at trade shows, shops that have emailed you asking about wholesale — you can send them to your Faire storefront using your unique Faire Direct link. When they place orders through that link, Faire charges you no commission at all. You still pay the $10 transaction fee, but the 25% or 15% disappears entirely.

For a $400 order:

• Standard first-order: you’d net $290 after 25% + $10
• Via Faire Direct: you’d net $390 after $10

That’s a $100 difference on one order. If you’re migrating five or ten existing wholesale accounts to Faire, that adds up fast.

The catch: retailers have to create a Faire account (if they don’t already have one) to order through your link. Most retailers who use Faire regularly are already on the platform. For those who aren’t, the onboarding is fairly painless — and they benefit from Faire’s net-60 payment terms, which is often a significant incentive for them.

Does Faire Have a Subscription or Annual Fee?

No — Faire does not charge brands a monthly or annual subscription fee to list and sell.

You can set up your Faire storefront and list your products without paying anything upfront. Faire only earns money when you make a sale. The commission and transaction fee come out of each order payout.

This is different from some wholesale platforms that charge a monthly fee for access. Faire’s free-to-list model is one of its genuine advantages, especially if your wholesale volume is still building.

Net-60 Payment Terms — Who Pays You, and When?

One of Faire’s most-talked-about features is that it offers retailers net-60 payment terms — retailers have 60 days to pay for their orders. You might wonder how that affects you.

The answer: it doesn’t. At least not directly.

Faire pays brands within 1–2 business days of an order being fulfilled. Faire extends the credit to the retailer; you don’t carry that risk. This is a genuine advantage over managing wholesale accounts yourself — chasing 60-day invoices from boutiques is genuinely painful, and Faire absorbs all of that.

The practical implication: once you mark an order as shipped, expect your payout within a couple of days. Faire’s cash flow for brands is actually faster than most retail channels, including some Etsy orders that take a few days to process.

How Faire Fees Affect Your COGS and Profitability

This is where most makers run into trouble.

Wholesale pricing is already a compression exercise — you’re typically pricing at 50% of retail (sometimes less). Add Faire’s commission on top, and if you haven’t done the maths carefully, you can end up selling products at a loss.

Here’s a worked example.

Say you make a soy candle. Your true cost to make it — materials, labour, packaging, overhead — is $8. You sell it for $28 retail. A standard wholesale price would be $14.

Now what happens on Faire?

• Wholesale price: $14
• Faire commission (25% first order): $3.50
• Transaction fee (split across units — assume 10 candles in the order): $1.00
• Your net: $9.50 per unit

Margin: $1.50. That’s an 11% margin on a product you’re probably working hard to make. If your COGS calculation missed anything — say, you forgot to account for your own labour time, or material costs increased since you last updated your recipes — you could easily be losing money.

On a repeat order at 15% commission:

• Commission: $2.10
• Transaction fee split: $1.00
• Net: $10.90 per unit
• Margin: $2.90 (21%)

Better, but still thin. The lesson isn’t that Faire isn’t worth it — for many makers it absolutely is — it’s that you need to know your actual cost floor before you set your wholesale price, not estimate it.

If you’re not tracking your cost of goods sold accurately, Faire will reveal that gap quickly. It’s one of those channels where the math matters more than the enthusiasm.

How to Set Faire Prices That Actually Work

A few principles that help makers price for Faire profitably:

Start with your true COGS, not an estimate

Your wholesale price needs to sit above your actual cost to make the product — including materials, labour, packaging, shipping supplies, and a share of your overhead. If you’re guessing at any of those numbers, you’re guessing at whether you’re profitable.

Tools like Craftybase calculate your cost per unit automatically as you log materials and recipes. When your material costs go up, your COGS updates automatically. That live number is your pricing floor — everything above it is margin.

Build the Faire fee into your wholesale price

Some makers price slightly higher on Faire than they would in a direct wholesale relationship — typically 10–15% more — precisely because Faire carries real costs. This is a legitimate approach. Just be mindful that Faire shows prices to all retailers browsing the platform, so you need to stay competitive within your category.

A working formula for your minimum viable Faire wholesale price:

Minimum Faire price = COGS ÷ (1 - commission rate)

For a product with an $8 COGS and a 25% first-order commission: $8 ÷ 0.75 = $10.67 — that’s your break-even point, before any profit margin. Add whatever margin you need above that.

Don’t forget the $10 transaction fee. On a 10-unit order, that’s $1 per unit. On a 5-unit order, it’s $2 per unit. Smaller orders have a higher effective fee rate.

Push for repeat orders — the economics get better

A retailer who orders twice is substantially more profitable than two retailers who each order once. The commission drops from 25% to 15%, and you’ve already done the work of getting them set up.

Everything that drives reorders — quick fulfillment, consistent quality, good communication, seasonal refreshes — directly improves your Faire unit economics. Build a process around it.

Use Faire Direct for your existing accounts

If you have wholesale relationships off Faire, bring them onto Faire Direct before they find you through the main marketplace. You’ll keep 100% of the commission that would otherwise go to Faire. Over a year, for an established wholesale account placing $500+ orders, that’s hundreds of dollars in fees you didn’t need to pay.

Faire vs. Selling Wholesale Direct — What’s the Real Trade-Off?

The honest answer is that Faire and direct wholesale aren’t mutually exclusive — most serious wholesale sellers use both. But it helps to understand what you’re trading.

What Faire gives you:

• Discovery by buyers who’d never find you otherwise
• Handled payment processing and credit management
• Net-60 terms without the invoice chasing
• Free returns on first orders (Faire absorbs this, not you)
• Built-in analytics on what’s selling

What Faire costs you:

• 25% of every new order’s value
• 15% of repeat orders
• $10 per transaction
• Some loss of direct relationship with the retailer

What direct wholesale gives you:

• No commission (just payment processing costs if you use Stripe, etc.)
• Full control of the relationship
• Ability to price differently for different accounts
• Direct communication — the retailer knows your business, not just your Faire listing

The calculus usually goes something like this: use Faire for new customer acquisition (buyers who find you through the marketplace), and direct wholesale or Faire Direct for existing accounts you’ve already built relationships with. That way you’re only paying the 25% commission for genuinely new business — which is a reasonable cost of acquisition when you consider what it would cost to reach those retailers through trade shows or cold outreach.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Bottom Line on Faire Fees

Faire is expensive compared to selling direct. That’s the honest truth. A 25% first-order commission plus $10 per transaction is real money, and if your wholesale prices aren’t set correctly, it will hurt.

But Faire’s fee structure isn’t a trap — it’s a trade. You’re paying for access to a large, active buyer marketplace, for payment processing and credit management, and for a platform that drives discovery without requiring you to cold-call boutiques.

The makers who do well on Faire are the ones who do the maths first. They know their COGS. They know their margin floor. They price intentionally for the channel — not by copying their direct wholesale price and hoping it works.

If you’re not sure what your products actually cost to make, that’s the thing to fix first — before you set a single price on Faire. Because once the 25% comes out of that first order, guessing gets expensive fast.

Craftybase tracks your material costs and calculates your cost per unit automatically, so you always know exactly what you can and can’t afford to charge. If you’re selling wholesale — or planning to — start a free trial and run the numbers properly before your next order.