Reviewed 30 September 2026 · quarterly cycle
What is actually included in the service fee?
The buying step and the warehouse step. Everything after that, from the international leg to storage, is a separate line with a separate basis.
The evidence
The service fee covers placing the order with the seller and handling the item at the warehouse: intake, recording, a standard photo set, and repacking for forwarding. Those are the operations the agent performs that a buyer cannot perform themselves without a local presence, which is why the fee exists and why it is charged as a percentage of item value rather than as a flat amount.
What the fee does not cover is the movement of anything. The domestic leg from seller to warehouse is charged separately and frequently per seller shipment rather than per order, which means a haul assembled from three sellers carries three domestic legs. The international leg is charged separately again, on billed weight measured at the warehouse. Storage beyond the free window is charged per day.
The structural point worth internalising is that the fee basis changed shape across our snapshot series. In our Q1 baseline the fee was recorded as a single tier; in Q3 it is tiered by order size, which means the effective percentage falls as the order grows. That kind of change is not a price change, and it is exactly what the snapshot series exists to catch.
When this does not apply
Where promotional credits apply, they frequently attach to the service fee line rather than to the item, which makes the effective fee lower than the published percentage. Checking the checkout total rather than the published rate is the way to see which applied.