What you pay for in each channel
A marketplace and your own site charge for different things. A marketplace takes a percentage of every sale, but it brings the buyer itself. A site takes almost nothing from the sale, but you have to bring the buyer there: with ads, search, social media.
That is why comparing marketplace commission with a site subscription is the wrong comparison. Horoshop's subscription is 288 hryvnias a month on annual billing, less than the commission on two or three flasks sold on a marketplace. The right comparison is marketplace commission against what one order from advertising costs on your site.
Terms of the three channels
| Prom catalogue, Basic plan | Rozetka | Own site on Horoshop | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fixed fee | 100 UAH every 30 days | 120 UAH a month; not charged if you used no services that month | 288 UAH a month on annual billing |
| Sales commission | category rate, from 1% to 25% in Prom's table; vacuum flasks and travel mugs — 15% | by category and item price; rates are not published | none |
| When it is charged | when the order arrives; refunded if the order is cancelled within 10 days or the buyer does not collect the parcel | only for completed orders; none for cancelled ones | — |
| Card payments | Prom-payment: 1.7% paid to a business account, 3.5% to a card | depends on the payment method you connect | LiqPay: 1.3% for Ukrainian cards |
| Who brings the buyer | the marketplace | the marketplace | you |
Two things to know about Rozetka. First, the commission rate is given to you by a manager after you apply, and registered sellers see it in their account. For most categories the rate also depends on the item's price. Second, VAT is added: 20% on 40% of the commission. In Rozetka's own example, a 1,000-hryvnia item at a 10% rate costs you 108 hryvnias, not 100. The effective rate is 1.08 times the stated one.
Prom publishes its rates: the commission table by category can be downloaded before you register. The median rate in that table is 14.75%: half of all categories pay that much or more. On the Basic plan the subscription is 100 hryvnias every 30 days, and the sales commission is the price of access.
One batch, three channels
An illustrative example. A shop buys 100 vacuum flasks at 480 hryvnias and sells them at 800. Each one leaves 320 hryvnias of gross profit. The buyer pays for delivery. The batch sells within a month, so the fixed fees are split across 100 units.
- Prom catalogue. 15% commission — 120 UAH, Prom-payment to a business account at 1.7% — 13.60 UAH, subscription — 1 UAH per unit. You keep 185.40 UAH per flask.
- Rozetka. We do not know the rate for flasks, so we take an illustrative 15%. With VAT that is 129.60 UAH, plus 1.20 UAH of subscription per unit. You keep 189.20 UAH, before any payment fee.
- Own site. LiqPay at 1.3% — 10.40 UAH, Horoshop subscription — 2.88 UAH per unit. You keep 306.72 UAH, but that is before advertising.
Purchase price 480 UAH, retail price 800 UAH, 100 units in a month, buyer pays delivery. Prom: 15% commission for the "vacuum flasks and travel mugs" category, Prom-payment to a business account 1.7%, 100 UAH subscription. Rozetka: the 15% rate is illustrative, with VAT on 40% of the commission, 120 UAH subscription, no payment fee. Site: Horoshop Basic at 288 UAH a month, LiqPay 1.3%. Rates checked on 12 October 2026.
Whether your own site wins or loses depends on one number: what you pay advertising for each order. At 100 hryvnias it beats both marketplaces. At 200 hryvnias it earns almost half as much.
The cost-per-order threshold
Subtract what the marketplace leaves you from what the site leaves you before advertising. The difference is the most you can pay advertising for one order without the site losing to the marketplace.
- Against the Prom catalogue: 306.72 − 185.40 = 121.32 UAH.
- Against Rozetka at a 10% rate: 74.32 UAH; at 15% — 117.52 UAH; at 20% — 160.72 UAH.
Work out your own threshold the same way: price × category rate (× 1.08 for Rozetka) + the payment fee on the marketplace − the payment fee on your site. The small subscriptions barely move it.
Where to get your cost per order from advertising is covered in the articles on customer acquisition cost and on online shop unit economics. A repeat buyer who comes to your site on their own costs advertising nothing. So for repeat sales the site clears the threshold almost every time.
Refusals and prices: the rules that change the maths
A marketplace refunds its commission, advertising does not. Rozetka does not charge commission on cancelled orders and refunds it if the buyer returns the item within 14 days. Prom refunds commission for an order cancelled within 10 days, and automatically for a parcel the buyer does not collect. The condition: the Nova Poshta or Ukrposhta waybill was created through the Prom account. Money spent advertising an order the buyer then refused does not come back. If your site gets many refusals of cash-on-delivery parcels, your real cost per order is higher than the ad account shows. How to price refusals is in the article on cash on delivery.
You cannot simply raise your Rozetka price by the commission. Rozetka's rules explicitly forbid prices that are unjustifiably higher than in your other sales channels. Breaking the rule can get the product or the whole shop blocked. So the commission comes out of your margin, not the buyer's pocket.
Prom charges commission on your site too if the buyer came from the catalogue. On the "Prom mix" and "Prom top" packages commission is charged if the buyer clicked the product in the catalogue and then ordered on the seller's site within 24 hours. And on a site with an address on a Prom subdomain, order commission is charged just as in the catalogue if the products are in active campaigns.
How to choose a channel
- Do you know what an order from advertising costs?Not the monthly budget, but the amount per paid order in this category. No → start on a marketplace and measure ads on your site in parallel
- Is that amount below your threshold?The threshold is the gap between what the site leaves you before advertising and what the marketplace leaves you. Yes → your site is cheaper for new buyers
- Do buyers come back to you?A repeat order on your site pays no advertising. Yes → send repeat sales to your site, and get new buyers wherever an order is cheaper
In practice this is rarely either-or. A marketplace can serve as a channel with a known price per order, and your site as the place for buyers you brought yourself or who came back.
Our position
A shop with no traffic of its own does better selling its first batch through a marketplace. Run small ads to your site in parallel and measure the cost per order. Move new buyers to your site only once that cost has stayed below the threshold for several weeks in a row. Send repeat buyers to your site from day one.
This does not hold if the marketplace takes more than half of the gross profit per unit in your category: a rate above 20–25% on a margin of a few tens of percent. Then the first batch on a marketplace earns almost nothing, and it is better to test your own channels straight away on a small batch.
Rates and rules checked on 12 October 2026 in Rozetka's seller help centre, Prom's help centre and commission table, and on Horoshop's and LiqPay's pricing pages. The calculation is an illustrative example; the Rozetka rate in it is assumed because Rozetka does not publish it.