What: TopHatter is an auction site to sell clothing, purses, shoes, housewares, beauty products, electronics, furniture, jewelry, crafts and tools
Expected pay: NA
Husl$core: $
Commissions & fees: vary
Where: Nationwide
Requirements: Be over the age of 18
Review:
It tells you something when a website is so reluctant to provide its commissions and fees that it doesn’t even allow you to see the specific fees you’ll be charged, until AFTER you upload products for sale.
What TopHatter does tell you is that you’ll be charged fees — many fees. There’s a success fee, which is charged when an item is won and paid for; a commission on the final sale price, plus the shipping price of each item; a processing fee for processing each paid order. When you want to cash out you, you pay another fee.
It just doesn’t spell out any of the specifics until you upload products for sale. However, a blog post estimated that the fees average 25% to 35% of the sale price, which is exorbitant. Worse, because this is an auction site, you don’t have any assurance that your products will sell for enough to make up for the high cost.
If you’re not yet convinced to pass this opportunity by, check out this piece by AuctionSiteNews, which notes there are entire Facebook groups dedicated to complaining about the site and that most of the positive reviews have disclaimers noting that they’ve been paid to tout TopHatter.
There are dozens of better places to sell — from eBay to Etsy — we suggest you find one (or more) that suit what you are selling and avoid this site.
What their users say: From Creative Hive:
“I started my minimum bid at $10, close to my wholesale price. And eventually it sold for $24. Tophatter takes a 10% commission off your winning bid, so eventually I received a Paypal notification for $24.60 ($24 winning bid + $3 shipping – $2.40 commission). I made just shy of $19 for the necklace. That’s a 32% discount off my retail price, or a $9 cost all together….or $9, I’d have to say this marketing promo was so-so. Tophatter’s 10% cut is steep, but considering that they provide you an instant sale, that’s not too much to ask. I had some short time for chatting with people in real time, and even had some people convert into website visitors. Plus I gain 2 weeks for being listed in their archives for people to see. I’d like to view this as not just a one time sale, but also as another way to market your shop. Something like this does have long-term effects on your overall business.”
From Pissed Consumer
I have been a member of Tophatter for some years now. I recently became a partner. It means I could sell higher volumes. Let me give you a piece of advice… it is not worth it. Following you will see an example of the fees they charge and the $ you make. I sold a set of 6 Kleancolor nail polish. My cost is $3. The item sold for a total of $15 ($10 for the item plus $5 for shipping) Fees: Listing fee $1; Label cost: $3.45; Commission fee (30%): $4.50; Processing fee:$0.74 Total fees taken: $9.69 My item cost: $3.00 Total: $11.69 My profit: $3.31 That does not include the $ I spend on gas when I go drop off at the post office or buy my product. Nor the time I send printing, wrapping the package.The envelope I use or the bubble wrapping. I wish buyers would know all this when they purchase so they have an idea of what the sellers are making. Basically, in order to make money sellers are being forced to sell cheap inexpensive products at a super inflated rate. I do understand that the system they use is expensive and their platform costly, however, pages like Amazon and eBay take much less percentage for a better site.
I have been selling on Tophatter for over a year and let me tell you I am surprised they have any sellers left. I honestly can’t figure out how anyone is making any money on this site. At first it was awesome. All together the fees were only about 10% but after a few radical changes, then changes back as they got too many seller complaints, they have just started a new fee policy which easily rivals the original radical changes they made. Now to have any product listed in an auction you have to pay a scheduling fee of around $1.50. I say around because they give you a suggested amount that should be paid if you want them to even consider entering your item into an auction. Then if your item doesn’t sell, which happens a lot even if you have a great product listed as either there are too many products on each page to scroll through or there aren’t enough buyers on the pages, you still have to pay that $1.50. Now if your item does sell you have to pay the $1.50 plus 12.9% of the winning bid with shipping included and an extra $0.30 on top of all that. Because most items sell for $10 or under I will work the math for you and this might also shed some light on why so many sellers are selling very VERY cheap items. If I sell an item that costed me $5 for $5 plus $5 for shipping the sale equals $10 which gives me a profit of $5. Then you take out all the fees…so 12.9% of $10 is $1.29 + $150 + 0.30 which equals $3.09. So my actual profit after all of this? $1.91. Now you also have to consider the cost of packaging supplies the drive to the post office etc. And again this is only if you sale your item. In the first 4 days of them implementing their new system I lost just under $200. Yes lost. As in I owe them this amount of money when I made $0. I was making a couple thousand a month before this new fee policy came to be. The reason? because they don’t tell you when they will list your item or how many times they will list it even if it doesn’t sell say the first 3 times. You can put that item on hold, if you even catch this happening in time as most sellers sell hundreds of items, but the hold doesn’t take affect until their system updates which can take hours. All the while you are losing a lot of money. They implied that you can set a budget for how much you want to spend for each category i.e. jewelry, toys, accessories etc. but again if the system picks one item and auctions if off over and over again it will eat your entire budget and you wont make a single sale. Before this drastic change the system would put up your items in auction with no fee if it didn’t sell and if it didn’t sell say twice your item would not be put up for auction again. It would also tell you what to improve on that listing if you wanted to try and have it auctioned again. Beyond that there is also another lovely new fee policy which states if an item is returned or delivered broken you not only have to refund the buyer but you also still have to pay all the fees. That means in the above example you would lose $8.09 which is the cost of the product plus all the fees. Now if the package was really delivered broken I could understand this, however buyers have learned that they only need to say an item was delivered broken and without showing any proof they will automatically get refunded with no questions asked. This happens A LOT. So I hope this sheds some light on Tophatters seller fees and why sellers are selling $1 items for as much as they can get. Also it should be noted that if you do buy an item and it is super cheap and you list that as the reason for the return, which again happens a lot to the buyers due to the fees sellers have to pay, you can’t get a refund unless you ship it back to wherever it came from – China in most cases – with a tracking number. That postage that you have to pay to ship with a tracking number out of pocket is guaranteed to be way more that you paid for the cheap item so you won’t return it. Before these changes to the fees most sellers were legitimate, like me, and sold some really great items. Now, well it is about how can you trick someone into buying your very cheap item for a lot of money…or just trying to not owe Topphatter any money…which isn’t likely…in either case.