Broker or Marketplace to Sell My Business?
Written by Christopher Krassnig - Founder - Kairos Exchange and ZenoX Media. Last reviewed 4 September 2026.
Use a marketplace when your numbers can be checked and you will do the talking. Use a full-service broker when the sale needs someone to run it. The third route, selling privately, saves the fee and gives up the protections. On Kairos, self-serve is 5% at any price, minimum EUR 500, and full-service is an option from EUR 100,000 up, never a requirement.
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What Does a Full-Service Broker Actually Do for the Fee?
It runs the sale instead of handing you a listing page. Buyer outreach, negotiation, the paperwork, and someone walking the deal through diligence, which is real work a busy owner may not want to do. It is priced like work. Website Closers' own fee explainer quotes 4 to 10 percent for a business broker, and plenty of firms publish no rate at all, so their real number arrives in a private proposal. Empire Flippers is a curated brokerage rather than an open venue, and its published calculator sits above that range: a flat 10,000 dollars on sales up to 66,666.66 dollars, then 15 percent of the price up to 700,000 dollars. Screening and selling, priced together, cost more than selling alone. The question is not whether the service is any good. It is whether your sale needs that much of it, because a store with clean books and a listing sitting where buyers already shop is buying far less of that work than a business whose numbers have to be argued for line by line.
What Do You Get on a Marketplace, and What Is Left to You?
Reach and the mechanics: a listing in front of people who arrived already shopping, somewhere to hold the documents, and a standard way to take an offer. What is left to you is the talking. You answer the questions, you defend the numbers, and you agree the price. Flippa is the open end of that trade, and its published pricing is a 10 percent success fee plus a non-refundable listing package of 29 to 699 dollars, which you pay whether or not the store sells. Curated venues screen before a listing goes live and charge like the brokerage above, which is the same trade running the other way. Either way the gap you cover yourself is proof, because a buyer reads your numbers from a source they trust or discounts them.
Is Selling It Privately a Real Third Option?
Yes, and it looks cheapest on paper, which is exactly how it goes wrong. A private sale to a competitor or someone in your network pays no commission to anyone. What it also has is no escrow unless you arrange it yourself, so money moves on trust by default; no verified numbers, so you are back to screenshots; no transfer playbook, so the handover is improvised; and no recourse when something breaks after the wire. Those four gaps are what a venue's fee was covering. The portable rule survives whichever route you pick: money never moves outside escrow, which a private seller can open directly with Escrow.com at its own published rate, and financials never move before an NDA, however well you know the buyer. A private buyer worth talking to is common. A private process with nothing standing behind it is where a good price turns into a bad close.
When Is Full-Service Worth Paying For?
At EUR 100,000 and up, and only if the seller wants it. That is the line on the Kairos full-service lane: 12% on the first EUR 500,000, then 9% above it, with a minimum of EUR 10,000, against 5% and a minimum of EUR 500 on self-serve. Self-serve stays open at every price, including well above that line, and nobody is placed in the other lane. The lane is Kairos running the sale for a seller: buyer outreach, negotiation and the paperwork. Kairos is not a business broker and is not registered as one in any jurisdiction. At the line itself the two lanes price out at EUR 12,000 against EUR 5,000, so a managed sale has to be worth that EUR 7,000 gap. Below the line the full-service minimum alone, EUR 10,000, is over twice the entire self-serve fee on the same sale, which is why the option does not open down there.
What Does the Method Choice Not Change?
The money path and the handover. On either Kairos lane the order is the same: the buyer funds the cash-at-close part of the price with Escrow.com before anything transfers, both sides sign the asset purchase agreement, every critical asset is handed over and ticked off, the buyer confirms it, and only then does escrow release. One critical item still open blocks the close, whichever lane the seller picked. Listing is free on both, checking your numbers against real order data is free on both, and the success fee only exists once a deal closes. So the method decides who runs the sale and what it costs. It does not decide how the money moves, or how the store actually changes hands.
Related questions
Checked against
- Website Closers: business broker pricing and fees - read 29 July 2026
- Empire Flippers commission calculator - read 29 July 2026
- Flippa pricing: listing packages and success fee - read 29 July 2026
- Escrow.com fee calculator - read 29 July 2026
Answered. Now Get Your Numbers Proven
Sellers on the list go through verification first when we open. Reading up is step one. Having your revenue proven from your own orders is step two.