August 27, 2026
Where to sell lingerie online
Four routes, what each one actually costs, and the moderation problem that only affects intimates.
In short
Where should I sell my lingerie online?
There are four routes, and they suit different stages. Your own store keeps all the margin but brings no traffic. An open marketplace brings traffic but buries you and moderates intimates strictly. A wholesale platform sells you to shops rather than shoppers. A curated marketplace trades a commission for a smaller catalogue and category-specific handling. Most independent brands end up on two of the four at once.
There are four ways to sell lingerie online, and the sales pitch for each one comes from a company with an interest in the answer. Store-builder software tells you to build your own store. Marketplaces tell you to join a marketplace. This guide sets out what each route actually costs, what it actually does for you, and where each one fails — including where a curated marketplace, this one included, is the wrong choice.
The four routes
Your own store. Shopify, Ecwid, Squarespace and the rest. You keep everything except payment processing and the subscription, and you own the customer relationship outright. What you do not get is a single visitor. Every person who arrives is one you found and paid for, through advertising, social, search, or your own audience. For lingerie that acquisition problem is worse than for most categories, for reasons below.
An open marketplace. Etsy is the obvious one. Enormous existing demand, no approval barrier, and you are one of roughly 1.8 million sellers. Discovery is a search-ranking problem inside somebody else's catalogue, and the fee stack is larger than the headline.
A wholesale platform. Faire and Ankorstore sell you to shops rather than shoppers. The unit is a wholesale order at wholesale margin, and one good stockist relationship is worth more than a hundred retail orders. It is a fundamentally different business from direct retail, not a variant of it.
A curated marketplace. Wolf & Badger, Garmentory, and this one. An application, a smaller catalogue, and a commission. You trade some margin for being visible inside a set of a few hundred brands instead of a few million, and for a buyer who arrived expecting your price band.
What each route actually costs
Rates each platform publishes for itself:
| Route | Cost |
|---|---|
| Own store (Shopify) | From $29/month, plus payment processing |
| Etsy | $0.20 per listing, 6.5% transaction, 3% + $0.25 processing, and 15% Offsite Ads |
| Mercari | 10% |
| Faire | Free to join, 15% on marketplace orders, $10 first-order fee, 0% on brands you bring yourself |
| Poshmark | 20% |
| CougarMetropolis | Free to join, 5% per sale |
Two things about that table are easy to miss.
The first is that Etsy's Offsite Ads fee is not optional once you pass $10,000 in sales over twelve months. At that point you are permanently opted in and cannot leave. Stack the fees on a $120 sale and the effective take approaches 20%, not 6.5%.
The second is what is absent. Wolf & Badger and Garmentory publish no commission rate at all — you learn it after you apply. Third-party reporting puts Wolf & Badger's membership at roughly $150 a month with commission somewhere in the low-to-mid thirties, but the company does not confirm a figure publicly, and vendor reviews complain specifically about fee changes arriving without notice in writing. Treat an unpublished rate as information in itself.
The problem that only affects intimates
Every route above is available to a candle maker on the same terms. Lingerie is different, and the difference is moderation.
Etsy publishes exactly which intimates are permitted, down to which parts of the body must be covered by opaque fabric, and requires correct mature-content tagging. In 2024 it removed an entire adult-adjacent category with about a month's notice, which sellers first learned about through social media. Whether or not your work is anywhere near that boundary, you are operating inside a classifier that was not built with your product in mind.
Advertising is worse. Adweek reported that a photograph of a bra alone — no model, no skin — can be rejected for nudity. Fortune reported that inconsistent enforcement lands hardest on small bra and underwear retailers rather than large advertisers. Instagram has demoted content it classifies as suggestive, which swimwear and lingerie brands have objected to publicly.
That combination is why the own-store route is harder for this category than for others. You can build a beautiful store and then find the cheapest way to fill it is closed to you.
To be precise about one thing, because it is often overstated: mainstream payment processors do not prohibit lingerie. Stripe's restricted list covers pornography and sexually oriented material, not intimate apparel. The risk is adjacency and sudden account review, not a formal ban.
How to choose
Sell on your own store if you already have an audience — an email list, a following, a wholesale base — that will follow you there. The margin is only worth it if you can fill the shop.
Sell on an open marketplace if volume matters more than positioning and your price band is low enough that a 20% effective take still works. Accept that you are renting the demand, and that the terms can change.
Sell wholesale if your production can absorb wholesale margin at volume and you would rather manage twenty stockists than twenty thousand customers.
Sell on a curated marketplace if your work is priced above the marketplace average and needs context to sell — provenance, materials, fit information — and you would rather be one of two hundred brands than one of two million.
Most independent brands end up running two of these at once: a curated marketplace or wholesale platform for reach, and their own store for the customers who come back. That is a sound strategy, and no route on this list requires exclusivity.
Where this marketplace fits
CougarMetropolis is the fourth kind. It is free to join, takes 5% of each sale, answers applications within two business days, pays out weekly through Stripe Connect to an account in your own name, and reviews imagery by hand before it publishes rather than flagging it after the fact. Vendors keep their own storefront, set their own prices, and are under no exclusivity obligation.
It will be the wrong choice for some brands. If you need volume above all, an open marketplace has more buyers. If your margin cannot carry any commission, your own store is the answer. If you sell to shops rather than people, a wholesale platform is a better fit.
If you are an independent lingerie brand that keeps losing time to moderation queues and rejected ads, and would rather be somewhere the category is the point, the vendor terms are published in full.
Sources
Fee figures are as published by Etsy, Faire, Mercari, Poshmark and Shopify on their own seller pages and help centres. Etsy's Offsite Ads threshold and adult-content policy are from Etsy's published policies. Advertising rejection reporting is from Adweek and Fortune. Wolf & Badger membership and commission figures are third-party reported and not confirmed by the company. Reviewed August 2026.