Both put your products in front of buyers. The difference is who owns the customer, what you pay, and whether AI shopping agents can actually find and recommend you.
Join the Waiting List →No upfront fee · You only pay when you sell · You remain the seller of record
A traditional marketplace is built to sell its brand and capture its customers. Vendoora is built to make your products discoverable, recommendable and purchasable through AI agents, while you keep the customer and the margin. Here is how the two models compare, point by point.
Vendoora is an agent-first commerce platform: it gives you a checkout and a listing like a marketplace, but its core job is to structure your product data so AI shopping agents, LLMs and answer engines can understand and recommend you. You remain the seller of record, you fulfil your own orders, and you pay commission only when you sell. Traditional marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay and Etsy own the buyer relationship, charge a blend of listing, referral and fulfilment fees that typically lands between 15% and 30%, and optimise for their own on-site search rather than agent-led discovery.
| Vendoora | Traditional marketplaces | |
| Commission | 7.5% on net sales up to £100k/mo, 5% above | Typically 15–30% combined (listing, referral, fulfilment) |
| Setup, monthly & listing fees | None | Often charged (subscription, per-listing or both) |
| Seller of record | You remain the seller | Marketplace mediates the sale |
| Customer relationship | Yours to keep | Largely owned by the marketplace |
| Built for AI agent discovery | Yes (core purpose) | No, optimised for on-site search |
| Product-feed optimisation | Cleaned and enriched for you | Your responsibility |
| Vetting | Manual verification of every vendor | Largely open or automated |
| Payments | Stripe Connect; you get paid directly | Marketplace holds and disburses funds |
| No product feed? | We can build one from your site or catalogue | You must supply a compliant feed |
Marketplace figures are typical ranges across major platforms and vary by category and fulfilment model. Vendoora commission is calculated on net product revenue, excluding VAT, shipping, refunds, cancellations, chargebacks and returns. Stripe processing fees apply separately.
The headline difference most sellers notice first is cost. Traditional marketplaces combine several fees: a subscription or per-listing charge, a referral or category fee on each sale, and often a fulfilment fee on top. Stacked together, the effective take rate commonly sits between 15% and 30% of the sale.
Vendoora charges a single commission, 7.5% on net product sales up to £100,000 per month, dropping to 5% above that, with no setup fee, no monthly fee and no listing fee. If you do not sell, you do not pay. You can review the full breakdown on the pricing page.
On a traditional marketplace, the buyer is the marketplace's customer, not yours. You rarely get the contact details, repeat purchases route back through the platform, and your brand sits behind theirs. Vendoora is structured so you remain the seller of record: you fulfil the order, you keep the customer relationship, and Vendoora provides the AI commerce, optimisation and checkout layer around it.
This is the difference that matters most as shopping shifts from search-first to agent-first. Marketplaces optimise for their own internal search box. Vendoora exists to make your products legible to external AI shopping agents and answer engines, the systems that increasingly decide which products get recommended. That means structured attributes, clean descriptions and trust signals, not keyword bidding. If your product feed was built for old search, a marketplace will not fix it for you. Vendoora will.
Marketplaces expect a compliant feed and leave the work to you. Vendoora ingests your existing feed, or builds one from your website or catalogue if you do not have one, then cleans, enriches and structures it for AI discovery. Every vendor is manually verified before approval, which protects shoppers and keeps the marketplace credible rather than flooded.
It is not either/or. Many sellers will keep their marketplace channels and add Vendoora as a low-risk, performance-based channel built for the AI shopping era. Because there is no upfront cost, the downside is limited and the upside is visibility in a channel most competitors have not prepared for. If you want to understand the wider shift first, start with What Is Agentic Commerce? or see how Vendoora works.
This article is for informational purposes. Marketplace fees and AI agent behaviour vary by platform and are subject to change. Terisa Able, June 2026.