What It Actually Costs to Sell Commercial Catering Equipment in the UK

Most operators price a piece of used kit by asking what it is worth. Fewer ask the second question, which is what will be left after the platform has taken its share. On a £150 microwave the difference is small enough to ignore. On a £2,000 combi oven it is the difference between covering the deposit on the replacement and not.

This is a plain look at what it costs to sell commercial catering equipment in the UK in 2026: which fees exist, where they come from, and how to work out what you would actually keep before you commit to a platform. If you are still deciding which channel to use at all, the companion piece on where to sell used catering equipment covers that side of it. This one is only about the money.

The five places a fee can come out of your sale

Every marketplace uses its own vocabulary, so it helps to sort the charges by what they actually do rather than what they are called.

• The listing fee: a fixed amount to put the item in front of people, charged whether it sells or not. It does not move with the sale price, which is exactly why it is the cheapest kind of fee to carry on expensive kit.
• The final value fee: a percentage of what the item sells for, taken when it sells. This is the one that grows. Double the value of the machine and you double the fee, for the same listing, the same photographs and the same amount of work from you.
• The per-order fee: a small fixed charge added on top of the percentage on each order. Pennies on a fryer, still pennies on a cold room, and easy to forget in a calculation.
• The regulatory or operating fee: a further percentage some platforms add to cover compliance costs. Small on its own, and it compounds the same way the final value fee does because it is charged on the sale total too.
• VAT and payment costs: business seller fees are commonly quoted excluding VAT, so the real deduction is higher than the headline rate. Then there is the cost of a dispute or a chargeback if a delivery goes wrong, which on heavy kit is not a remote risk.

The important structural point is that three of those five scale with the price of the machine and two do not. Catering equipment is high value by nature, so a seller of ovens and refrigeration feels percentage fees far more sharply than someone shifting phone cases.

An example calculation on a £2,000 combi oven

This is an example calculation, not a real sale, and no seller's real figures are involved. The rates below are eBay UK's published business seller rates for the Business, Office & Industrial category, checked on 26 July 2026 against eBay's own fee pages, which show the category rate as last updated on 12 February 2026. Rates change, so check them again on the day you list.

Say you are selling a used single door combi oven and it goes for £2,000 including collection.

• Final value fee at 12.5% of the total amount of the sale: £250.00
• Regulatory operating fee at 0.35% of the total amount of the sale: £7.00
• Per-order fee on an order over £10: £0.40
• Example total deducted: £257.40, before VAT is added to those fees

Now run the same sums on a £6,000 walk-in fridge and the deduction is roughly three times larger, because nothing about the fee is anchored to the work involved. You wrote one listing, took the same six photographs and answered the same questions. The fee tripled because the machine was worth more.

Two things soften that picture and both are worth knowing. Private sellers on eBay in the UK currently pay no final value fee at all, which is genuinely a good deal, but a business selling business assets is not a private seller and cannot use that route. And a Classified Ad listing in that category is a flat £8.69 with no final value fee, which is a much better shape for expensive kit, though it does not include the same buyer protection or the same placement. On Facebook Marketplace a local collection sale carries no selling fee, so the cost there is not money, it is the audience: you are describing a three phase machine to people who mostly are not buying one.

Where CaterBids sits on this

CaterBids is built on the flat side of that split. There is no percentage taken when your item sells, whatever it sells for. £5 to list. Nothing off the sale. A single listing is £5 for thirty days with up to six photos, a three pack is £12 and a ten pack is £35, and the launch offer is that the first 100 listings on the platform are free, thirty days live, up to six photos, no fees of any kind, open to anyone. That 100 is a platform wide allowance, not a limited number of accounts.

The platform is in beta, and it is deliberately UK only and catering only, so a listing is seen by people who already know what a 6-grid oven is worth. It was built by someone with 25 years in commercial kitchens: stainless fabrication, installation and commercial gas.

The costs that are not fees and still come off the price

Fees are the part people argue about. The rest of the deduction is usually logistics, and on catering equipment it is not trivial.

• Palletising and wrapping: a combi oven wants a decent pallet, corner protection and heavy duty shrink wrap. Budget for it properly. A machine that arrives scuffed becomes a partial refund conversation.
• Tail-lift and access: if either end lacks a forklift, you are paying for a tail-lift vehicle and often a two person delivery. Ask the buyer about their access before you quote a delivery price, not after.
• Disconnection: gas kit needs a Gas Safe registered engineer to disconnect and cap off, and the buyer will want to see the commercial gas paperwork. That is a real line in your costs.
• Cleaning and photographs: an hour with a degreaser measurably changes what an oven sells for. It costs you time rather than money, and it is the highest return work in the whole process.

Work the fees and the logistics out together, before you set the number on the ticket. If you want a sanity check on the number itself, the combi oven valuation guide walks through what actually moves the price.

The checklist before you list

• Write down the price you expect to achieve, not the price you hope for.
• Look up the current listing fee and the current percentage fee on every platform you are considering, on the day you list.
• Multiply the percentage by your expected sale price and check whether VAT is added on top of it.
• Add the per-order and regulatory charges, then subtract the lot from your expected price.
• Price the pallet, the wrapping and the tail-lift delivery separately, and decide who pays for it.
• Book the Gas Safe disconnection and get the paperwork in hand before the item goes live.
• Compare what you would keep on each platform, then choose. Not the other way round.

None of this is complicated, it is just rarely done before the item goes live. Ten minutes with a calculator tells you which channel pays you most for the same machine, and on expensive kit the gap is large enough to matter. That is the whole point of BUY • SELL • SAVE: know the numbers on both sides of the deal, and keep the difference.

Ready to see what you would keep?

Put your kit in front of UK catering buyers only, with no cut taken from the sale. Sell catering equipment on CaterBids, or browse the marketplace first to see what similar machines are listed at.