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 - usually 10%, though each country sets its own per-product rate - and a flat 10% goes to the player who referred you into the game. The game fund takes nothing here, because the fund holds only gold and a local sale pays in national currency.
- On a global (gold) sale: a flat 10% goes to the game fund, your country's sale tax is charged too - paid in gold straight into your state budget - and the flat 10% referer share applies just the same.
- On game shares: exactly the same as any global sale - the game-fund fee, the sale tax and the referer share.
- Under occupation only: if your town is held by another player, that occupier takes a further 10% of the sale; if your whole country is occupied after losing a national war, the occupying country's treasury levies 10% more. In peacetime neither applies.
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. Your referer's flat 10% is another 50. That leaves 400, and in peacetime that is the whole of it - the occupation cuts only ever appear while your town or country is actually occupied. The rest lands in your balance the instant your offer sells.
It is worth saying the simple version plainly, because newcomers often expect hidden charges that are not there. On a local sale the deductions are your country's sale tax and the referer's flat 10%. A global or share sale pays those same two plus the flat 10% game fund fee, with the sale tax arriving in your state budget as gold. There is no buyer-side fee and no surprise line at the end: the buyer always pays exactly the sticker price. Check your own sell form before you confirm and it will show you every cut and the exact figure for your sale.
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 sale quietly feeds the treasury. The game fund fee on global sales plays a similar role for the game as a whole, keeping the wider economy ticking over. And the referer share is the game thanking the player who brought each of us in - one day your own affiliates will pay that very share to you. So the fees are not the game nibbling at you for no reason; they are the threads that keep countries, communities and the global market running, 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 more slices. 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; the sale tax at the default 10% takes another 0.1 gold for your state budget; your referer's 10% takes 0.1 gold more. You keep 0.7 gold. Game shares work exactly the same way, so a 1 gold share sale also leaves you 0.7 at the default rates. Whichever market you are on, the shape is identical: the buyer pays the sticker price, and the small slices come off your side before the rest reaches you.
The Affiliate Market and referral rewards
There is one more corner of the market that lives by these same fee rules, and it is an unusual one: the Affiliate Market, where you can sell the players you referred into the game. If someone signed up through your link they are your affiliate, and after a while you are allowed to sell that connection to another player for gold, just like any other listing. It feels strange the first time you meet it, but it works exactly like the halls you already know, with a seller, a price, and a small cut taken on the sale.
Not every affiliate can be listed, though, because the game wants the ones that change hands to be real, active players rather than empty names. An ordinary affiliate becomes eligible only once they signed up at least 30 days ago, have been active in the last 5 days, and have actually mined some gold - those three together prove the account is a genuine, working player worth buying. There is one shortcut: an affiliate with active premium membership can be listed at any time, with no waiting and no conditions, because their premium already shows they are real.
Selling an affiliate has the usual cut
When one of your affiliates sells, the price is trimmed by the same fee you saw above: a flat 10% goes to the game fund, and the rest lands in your balance. It is the familiar game-fund cut, simply applied to a person instead of a sack of goods.
Affiliates are not only something to sell, though; they quietly pay you too, in two distinct ways. First, every player you referred sends you 10% of all the gold they mine and all the raw materials they produce, paid in kind: their mined gold arrives as gold in your balance, their wood or iron as goods in your town's storage. Everyone pays this share, premium players included, so an industrious affiliate keeps paying you back for as long as they play. Second, whenever a player you referred buys premium membership, you receive 10% of what they paid, handed straight to you in gold. So it pays to keep an eye on your affiliates from both sides - as listings you might one day sell, and as a steady stream of goods and gold while they work and upgrade.
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 cuts, and a bit more on top to make any real profit. If you bought wood at 5 and the cuts on your sale come to 20% - the usual sale tax plus the referer share - then selling back at 5 would leave you with only about 4, a quiet loss. Aim comfortably 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.