Restocking Fee Rules by Marketplace: Who Can Charge What

Restocking fee rules by marketplace have moved in one direction for the last decade: away from you. Most major platforms no longer let a seller publish a restocking fee at all, and in the EU the fee was never lawful for a consumer exercising the withdrawal right. What survives is narrower and more conditional than most exporters assume, and the returns that hurt furniture and building-material suppliers most — wrong size, wrong spec — are exactly the ones where no fee is chargeable.

Here is the table first, because that is what you came for, and then the three layers that decide whether the number in your terms is enforceable or decorative.

Restocking fee rules by marketplace: the comparison table

Channel	Can you publish a restocking fee?	Deduction when the item comes back in reduced condition	Cap
Walmart Marketplace (US)	No — except for items set up with a Return Policy Exemption	Yes, for exemption items not returned in original or sellable condition	Up to 20% of the item price, per Walmart's own policy
Amazon (US, seller-fulfilled)	Not for an in-policy return in original condition; only where the return is out of policy or the item comes back used, damaged or materially different	Yes, through the refund workflow	Varies by return-request type; Amazon publishes the allowable amounts in Seller Central
eBay	No — a stated restocking fee is not permitted	Yes, as a reduced refund when the item returns used, damaged or incomplete	Set by the eBay Money Back Guarantee, not by your listing
Your own store, US buyers	Yes, if lawfully and conspicuously disclosed before purchase	Yes	No federal cap; state disclosure law governs
Any EU/EEA consumer sale	No — the 14-day withdrawal must be free of charge	Yes, but only as diminished value, not as a flat fee	No fixed percentage; must reflect actual loss in value
UK consumer sale	No	Yes, diminished value only	Same shape as the EU rule
B2B wholesale (Faire, Alibaba, direct export contracts)	Yes — this is contract law, not consumer law	Yes	Whatever your terms say and the buyer accepted in writing

Read the last row against the first six. The right to charge a restocking fee has quietly migrated out of consumer channels and into B2B contracts — which is good news if you sell wholesale and bad news if you also run a direct-to-consumer storefront under the same terms document.

What a restocking fee actually is

A restocking fee is a deduction a seller keeps from a refund to cover the cost of returning an item to sellable stock. It is not return shipping, it is not a damage claim, and it is not a cancellation penalty. Confusing those four is the fastest way to lose a chargeback, because a platform reviewing the dispute will classify the deduction by what it actually covers, not by what you called it.

Three separate parties have to grant you permission before the fee sticks.

Layer 1: the law where the buyer lives

In the EU, Directive 2011/83/EU gives a consumer 14 days to withdraw from a distance contract without giving a reason and without incurring cost. The consumer may be required to bear the direct cost of returning the goods — but only if the trader told them so before the order. And the consumer is liable for any diminished value of the goods resulting from handling beyond what is necessary to establish their nature, characteristics and functioning; that liability disappears entirely if the trader failed to give notice of the withdrawal right. The UK version, the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013, has the same architecture.

Notice what that framework does not contain: any concept of a percentage fee. You may deduct for value actually lost, and you must be able to show the loss. "20% because that is our policy" is not a diminished-value assessment.

The US has no federal restocking-fee ban. What it has is disclosure law at state level — California's Civil Code section 1723, for example, requires a retail seller to post its refund policy conspicuously, and a seller that fails to do so must accept returns of unused, undamaged goods within 30 days. Separately, the FTC's Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule governs shipping timelines and prompt refunds. Together they mean an undisclosed fee in the US is not merely unpopular; it is often unenforceable.

Layer 2: the marketplace policy

This layer overrides yours even where the law would permit the fee. Walmart's position is explicit — sellers cannot apply restocking fees except for items set up with Return Exemptions, and for those items the ceiling is 20% of the item price where goods come back outside original or sellable condition. eBay does not allow a stated restocking fee at all; what remains is a reduced refund for an item that returns in worse shape than it left. Amazon distinguishes the in-policy return in original condition, which gets a full refund, from the out-of-policy or damaged return, which is where a deduction becomes possible.

Layer 3: your own published terms

The weakest layer, and the one sellers spend the most time on. A term that contradicts layer 1 is void, and a term that contradicts layer 2 gets reversed by the platform. Your terms only do work in the space the first two leave open — most usefully in B2B contracts, custom orders and freight-delivered goods.

The return you can never charge for

Here is the part that decides the actual money. A restocking fee only applies to a remorse return: the buyer changed their mind, the goods are fine. The moment a return is filed as not as described — wrong dimensions, wrong finish, wrong spec, doesn't fit the space — three things flip at once.

	Remorse return	Not-as-described return
Who pays return shipping	Usually the buyer	You
Restocking fee	Possible, where law and platform allow	None
Refund amount	May be reduced	Full
Effect on seller metrics	Neutral to mild	Counts against you on most platforms
Who decides the label	The buyer, at the click of a dropdown	The buyer, at the same dropdown

That last row is the one worth reading twice. The buyer classifies the return, not you, and the classification is worth more than the fee ever was. A supplier arguing about whether 15% or 20% is fair is optimising the smaller number while the larger one — full refund plus outbound freight plus return freight on an oversized item — is decided by a listing image nobody checked. The real arithmetic is laid out in oversized item return shipping cost, and the boundary between "I don't like it" and "it isn't what you said it was" is covered in goods not as described.

For furniture and building materials the pattern is stubborn: size and fit are among the most common reasons goods come back, which is why the e-commerce returns size statistics page is more useful to a spec-diagram decision than any fee schedule. A wardrobe that will not clear a stairwell is not a remorse return, however carefully you word your policy.

What actually recovers the money

Ranked by how much of the cost each one removes, not by how satisfying it feels.

Stop the misclassification at the listing. Every dimension the buyer needs to judge fit — overall, packed, assembled, internal, clearance required — published on the image rather than three scrolls down in a table. This converts would-be not-as-described returns into no returns.
Publish the numbers that create disputes before they create disputes. Door and stair clearance, cut-out sizes, tolerance ranges, and the difference between packed and assembled dimensions.
Set the fee only where it is enforceable. B2B contracts, custom-made goods, freight-delivered items — and disclose it before checkout, not in the confirmation email.
Charge the right thing. Where a return is genuinely remorse-driven and freight-heavy, an accurate return-shipping pass-through is easier to defend than a percentage fee.
Price the return, then decide. Run your own numbers through the return cost calculator before you change a policy — for oversized goods, the freight leg is usually several times whatever the restocking fee would have recovered.

The fix for size-driven returns is not a better fee schedule; it is a picture in which the sizes are actually visible. That means the real, measured dimensions locked onto the product photo — a measurement line snapped to the true edge of the object so the number on the image is the number on the tape, then exported at each marketplace's spec-diagram size. It is a categorically different thing from typing dimensions into a photo editor by hand, and further still from an AI image generator, which will produce a clean-looking "1,800 mm" it never measured. On a wardrobe, an invented dimension is a not-as-described return with your freight account attached.

Return-policy audit checklist

Restocking fee rules by marketplace shift without warning, and each channel now diverges from the others. Run this once a quarter.

Restocking fee, if any, disclosed before checkout — not only in the confirmation email
Separate line items for restocking fee, return shipping and damage deduction
No flat percentage applied to EU or UK consumer withdrawals
Diminished-value deductions supported by photographic evidence on file
Marketplace policy checked per channel, not copied from your own store terms
Return Policy Exemptions reviewed where the platform offers them
Custom-made and made-to-measure goods handled under their own clause
Freight-delivered goods have a stated redelivery and refusal policy
Every listing publishes packed, assembled and clearance dimensions
Return-reason data reviewed monthly and mapped to the listing that caused it

What to do this week

Pull one month of return reasons and split them into remorse versus not-as-described. If the second group is larger, your fee policy is irrelevant to your biggest cost.
Audit the top five SKUs by return value for missing dimensions, then fix those listings first.
Check each channel's current policy page rather than assuming they still agree with each other; they have been diverging.
Decide where the fee is worth keeping — in most catalogues that turns out to be B2B, custom and freight-delivered items only.
Cost the alternative. Better spec imagery is a one-off production cost per SKU; returns are a recurring one. Whether you make those diagrams in-house, hand them to a designer, or use software that locks measured dimensions onto the photo, the comparison to run is cost per SKU against return cost per SKU.

FAQ

Can you charge a restocking fee on Amazon or Walmart?

Only in narrow cases. Walmart states that sellers cannot apply restocking fees except for items set up with Return Exemptions, where the ceiling is 20% of the item price for goods not returned in original or sellable condition. Amazon allows a deduction where the return is outside its return window or the item comes back used, damaged or materially different, but an in-policy return in original condition gets a full refund.

Is a restocking fee legal in the EU?

No, not against a consumer using the 14-day right of withdrawal. Directive 2011/83/EU makes that withdrawal free of charge. You may require the consumer to bear the direct cost of returning the goods if you told them so before the order, and you may deduct for diminished value caused by handling beyond what is needed to establish the nature, characteristics and functioning of the goods — but that is an evidenced assessment of lost value, not a percentage.

What is a reasonable restocking fee for furniture?

Published furniture policies commonly sit in the mid-to-high teens as a percentage, with custom-made pieces frequently non-returnable instead of fee-bearing. Treat those as market practice rather than a standard: no regulation sets the number, and any figure has to survive the disclosure rules of the jurisdiction and the policy of the channel before it survives the buyer.

Can I charge a restocking fee if the buyer says the item was not as described?

No. A not-as-described return removes the fee, usually shifts return shipping to you, and requires a full refund. Because the buyer chooses the return reason, the practical control you have is upstream — publishing dimensions and specs clearly enough that the claim cannot be made in good faith.

Do restocking fees apply to B2B wholesale orders?

Yes, far more freely. Consumer withdrawal rights do not apply between businesses, so a restocking fee in a wholesale or export contract is a negotiated term. It still has to be in the accepted terms before the order, and it still loses to a genuine specification dispute.