Selling embroidery on Facebook Marketplace: pricing, payment, and pickup

To sell embroidery on Facebook Marketplace, list a finished piece with a real photo and a whole-dollar price that comes from your pricing formula. Then get paid in full through a payment link before you stitch, so pickup is only a handoff of something already paid for.

Marketplace is where most of my local customers find me. I run a home embroidery business in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and local orders go out as porch pickup. Everything below is how I set those orders up, with my real numbers.

List a finished piece, not a service

Post a photo of something you actually stitched, at a real price, with a plain description of what the buyer can change. "Embroidered crewneck sweatshirt, any name on the front, $31" tells a buyer exactly what they are getting. "Custom embroidery, message me for pricing" does not.

Meta's commerce policies also say commerce content may not promote the buying or selling of services, outside a couple of its business tools (Meta Commerce Policies). A sweatshirt with a name on it is an item. A post offering "embroidery services" reads like a service. Lead with the item.

Three things go in every listing I post:

• Your own photo of a stitched piece. A real photo answers "what will it look like" before they message.
• The price in the listing. When the price is in the listing, the people who message you have already seen the number.
• What the buyer can change: name, thread color, garment color. If a choice costs more, say what it costs.

How to price a Marketplace listing

Price it from the same formula you use for everything else. Mine is the blank cost doubled, plus $1.50 per 1,000 stitches, plus $5 per hooping, plus a $5 buffer for the conversation that comes with every custom order. The full method is in how to price machine embroidery. The free pricing calculator does the math for you.

Here is a one-name sweatshirt on a Gildan blank that costs me $9:

• Blank: $9 doubled is $18.
• Stitching: a single name runs about 2,000 stitches, so $3.
• Hooping: one placement, $5.
• Buffer: $5.

That comes to $31. The listing says $31. Listing prices are whole dollars, so if the math comes to $30.40, the listing says $31. Round up, never down.

My local Marketplace prices are lower than my Etsy prices for the same piece. A Gildan sweatshirt with MOM on the front is $46 for local pickup and $66 on Etsy and my website. My nationwide price matches Etsy, which carries an uplift for selling there that a porch pickup does not need.

Two numbers stay the same no matter where the order comes from. My minimum is $20 per order. There is no volume discount on stitching. Ten sweatshirts get ten times the stitching. If you are deciding where your own floor should be, the minimum order guide walks through it.

What Facebook charges you

When a Marketplace sale ships through Facebook's own checkout, Meta charges an individual seller 10% of the whole transaction, with a $0.80 minimum. That 10% is figured on the sale price plus shipping and tax (Meta Seller Protection Policy). On a $31 sweatshirt, that is $3.10 before you have paid for the blank.

My Marketplace orders are local and paid through my own order link, so they never go through that checkout. A card payment still has a cost. Stripe's standard rate for a US card is 2.9% plus 30 cents (Stripe pricing), which is $1.20 on a $31 order. If you take cards through Broidry on the free plan, Broidry's fee is 2% on top of that, and 1.5% on the paid plans (Broidry pricing). Put the card cost in your buffer, not in a surprise line on the buyer's total.

Get paid in full before you stitch

Every local order is paid in full before I start stitching. I stitch orders in the order the payments came in, so payment is what puts a piece on my schedule.

You do not have to announce this as a policy. Make payment the ordinary next step. When someone says yes, I send the order link with a short note like "I'll send you an order link and we'll be all set!" If someone asks to pay at pickup, the answer is the same: I get everything paid up front so I can get it right on the schedule.

Use a link, not a payment request typed into a chat. In Broidry, the buyer opens the order, sees exactly what they are getting, and pays by card through Stripe, with the money going to your own bank account. Once they accept the price, Broidry emails them the payment link, reminds them if it goes unpaid, and records the payment on the order. That way you never scroll back through a thread to figure out who paid. The deposits and payment policies guide covers business customers, where a 50% deposit makes more sense than full payment up front.

The payment scams to watch for

Marketplace sellers get targeted by scams that follow a few patterns. The FTC's advice for people selling online is short (FTC, selling stuff online, July 2022):

• Don't accept a mobile payment from someone you don't know.
• Never deposit a check for more than the selling price.
• Don't share a verification code with someone you don't know.

The code one catches people. A "buyer" says they want to make sure you are real and asks you to read back a code they texted you. That code sets up a Google Voice number tied to your phone, which the scammer then uses to cheat other people (FTC, the Google Voice scam). No real customer needs a code from you.

A payment link sidesteps most of this. The buyer pays the order and the payment shows on the order. That is the only proof you count. A screenshot of a payment is not a payment.

Collect every detail in one message

A Marketplace order starts as a chat, and chats are where details go missing. Before you send the payment link, make sure you have the garment, color, size, exact wording, thread color, and placements. Ask for anything missing in one message, not four.

The full checklist is in the embroidery order form template. If your orders keep getting lost in the thread, taking custom orders without the Facebook Messenger mess covers how to move them out of the chat.

In Broidry, you can drop in a screenshot of the Messenger conversation and it drafts the order: who it is for, what they want, and when they need it. It lists which details are still missing and gives you a message to send asking for them. The screenshot stays on the order, so the spelling the customer sent is always there to check.

Make pickup a simple handoff

Because the order is paid and every detail was settled before I stitched, pickup has nothing left to discuss. When the piece is done, I message the customer that it is ready for porch pickup. They come get it.

Don't ask a local buyer whether they want pickup or shipping. A Marketplace buyer found you because you are local, so pickup is the default. If they bring up shipping themselves, get the full address and add the shipping cost to their total before you send the payment link.

The FTC also points out that many sites suggest selling to a local buyer you can meet in person (FTC, selling stuff online). With custom work, the money should already be in before that meeting, so the handoff is the only thing that happens there.

The short version

List a real stitched piece at a whole-dollar price from your formula, with what can change written in the listing. Send a payment link and get paid in full before you stitch. Trust the payment on the order, never a screenshot, and never read a code back to a buyer. Get every detail in one message, then hand over a finished, paid-for piece at pickup.

If you want to run the numbers for your own listings first, start with the embroidery pricing calculator.