What it actually costs
Nobody writes this page because it is not persuasive. It is the one most worth reading before you start.
Time
| Realistic | |
|---|---|
| Setup, done properly | An hour or two, most of it establishing a fingerprint carefully |
| Learning to read the place | A few hours across a week, and it is worth taking |
| Each order | Minutes, plus waiting that you do not control |
| When something goes wrong | Hours, spread across days, mostly waiting on responses |
| Ongoing | A few minutes every few weeks keeping saved addresses current |
Money you can see
No buyer commission, which sounds like free and is not. Vendor fees are priced into listings, so you pay them either way and the difference is visibility rather than incidence. Comparing platforms on advertised buyer commission tells you very little, and comparing the price of a comparable listing tells you almost everything.
Money you do not see
- The acquisition spread. Frequently larger than every platform fee combined, and ignored because it happened before you arrived. Somebody optimising fee structure while paying a wide spread is optimising the small number.
- Network fees on every movement. Small individually, and they reward funding once rather than repeatedly.
- The cost of a small first order. Worth paying deliberately as tuition rather than discovering it on a large one.
Risk, which is the real price
This is where an honest accounting differs from the usual one, because these do not appear on any receipt.
| Risk | Realistic view |
|---|---|
| An order not arriving | Happens. Escrow and disputes cover most of it, not all, and not quickly. |
| Losing an account | Usually self inflicted through reuse or a skipped check. Largely preventable. |
| A parked balance | Entirely under your control and the most common avoidable loss. |
| The platform ending | Nobody can predict it. Every market that ended badly had a good stretch immediately before. |
| Linkage to you | Almost always created at the money boundary, not on the platform. |
The comparison nobody runs
Against doing nothing. Setup time, learning time, the spread, the waiting, the attention it takes to keep habits sharp, and the tail risk of a bad outcome, against whatever you were hoping to get. A lot of people do this arithmetic only after their first bad experience, and a fair number conclude they would not have started. That page is next.