Your Catering Equipment Did Not Sell: What It Costs to List It Again

Your combi oven has been listed for six weeks and the phone has not rung. Now you have to decide whether to pay to list it again, drop the price, or move it somewhere else.

Almost nobody puts the numbers for that second decision in front of you. Here is what each platform charges you to try again, all checked on 6 September 2026.

Why The Second Listing Is The One That Hurts

Platforms make their money in two completely different ways, and the difference only shows up when something does not sell.

Some charge you to be seen. You pay up front, it sells or it does not, and if it does not you pay again. Others charge you nothing until money changes hands, then take a cut on the day it sells.

On a £200 saladette that difference is pennies. On a £5,000 combi oven it decides where you should have listed in the first place.

eBay Is The Cheapest Place In Britain To Fail

This is the part that surprises sellers, and it is worth saying plainly even though it does not help me.

eBay charges you when the item sells. For business sellers in Business, Office and Industrial the final value fee is 12.5%, plus a 0.35% regulatory operating fee and 40p per order over £10, and all of those are quoted exclusive of VAT (eBay UK selling fees, checked 6 September 2026). On a £5,000 combi oven that is £625 plus £17.50 plus 40p, which comes to £771 once VAT on the fees goes on.

If it does not sell you have paid almost nothing. A business seller with no eBay Shop pays 30p per fixed price listing. And if you are a private seller rather than a business, eBay's own page says selling is now free for UK private sellers, with no final value fee and no regulatory operating fee. The one carve out is motors, so a catering van or trailer listed in a vehicle category is not covered.

So eBay is brutal when you win and close to free when you lose. Worth knowing if your kit is likely to sit. The wider comparison of what each platform charges to sell covers the first listing rather than the second.

The Trade Sites Charge You To Try Again

The specialist sites work the other way round. secondhand-catering-equipment.co.uk prices by value band, starting at £4.50 for anything up to £50 and rising to £60 for items over £5,000, all plus VAT.

Their re-listing terms are worth reading properly, because sellers get them wrong. Drop your asking price by 10% or more and they move the advert back to the top of the site for nothing, and you can keep doing that until it sells, though an advert cannot be re-listed once it is a year old. Hold your price and it costs £5 to re-list, capped at two per advert. Moving several at once, the first is £5 and each after that is £2.50.

They also discount in bulk, and the formula is unusually clear. Adverts submitted together totalling £60 get 6% off, £400 gets 40% off, capped at 50%. A dealer clearing a unit pays roughly half what you pay for one machine.

Now the honest bit about us. CaterBids is £5 for thirty days at any value, with no commission and nothing taken off the sale price. But at thirty days the listing expires. If it has not sold you list it again, and that is another £5. The specialist site does not charge you at all to move an advert back to the top if you drop the price by 10%, and we have no equivalent. If your kit is slow, budget for it.

What A Third Listing Tells A Buyer

The fees are not the real cost of relisting. This is.

The trade is small and buyers have long memories. An engineer or a dealer who watches the same fryer come back up three times with the price creeping down does not think bargain. He thinks there is something wrong with it, and he waits. By the fourth appearance you are not negotiating from your price any more, you are negotiating from his suspicion.

I have watched operators spend more in platform fees shifting a mobile kitchen than they spent on its last full service, and still take less at the end than they would have taken in week one, because the kit had gone stale in public.

If it has not moved in thirty days the problem is almost never the platform. It is the price, or the photographs, or the listing does not tell a buyer what he needs before he will pick up the phone: what it is, what condition it is really in, and how it gets to him. Fix that before you pay anybody anything. Our guide on how to write a used catering equipment listing covers what is usually missing.

So Where Does Unsold Kit Actually Go

Drop the price by 10% and take the free bump if you are on a trade site. It is the cheapest move available to you and most sellers pay for a re-list without ever trying it.

If the machine is high value and you can afford to wait, eBay costs you next to nothing to leave sitting. If you want it in front of the trade at a fixed price with nothing taken off the sale, relist it properly and write it properly this time. Photograph the data plate and CaterBot fills in the specs and the pallet quote, so the second listing carries the detail the first one was missing.

If you are relisting because a kitchen is closing rather than because one machine is slow, selling the whole kitchen is a different job with different maths. And if you are weighing a timed sale against a fixed price, we have been through what actually gets you paid.

Before You Pay To List It Again

• Asking price checked against what similar kit is actually selling for, not what you paid
• New photographs taken, including the data plate
• Description answers what it is, what condition it is really in, and how it gets to the buyer
• Weight and dimensions confirmed so a delivery quote is possible
• Tried the 10% price drop and the free bump before paying for anything
• Worked out what three more re-lists will cost you against dropping the price today

CaterBids lists new and used commercial catering equipment, vans, trailers and catering businesses at a fixed price. £5 for thirty days, and nothing off what you sell it for. BUY • SELL • SAVE

Ready To List It Again?

List your equipment on CaterBids at a fixed price, with no commission and no final value fee.