The money side of running an antique mall
The money side of an antique mall is three ledgers at once: what customers pay at the register, what vendors are owed after splits and booth rent, and what the operator actually keeps after card fees and sales tax. Most industry writing skips the numbers. This collection is the numbers.
Margin in a booth-based mall doesn't behave like retail margin. Revenue is a blend — booth rent, a percentage of vendor sales, and often a card-fee recovery line — and each lever moves differently. A mall that only charges rent leaves money on the table and loses leverage with its best dealers; a mall that only takes a split rides the floor's ups and downs with no base underneath. The hybrid models that dominate in 2026 exist because operators worked this out the hard way, one lease renewal at a time.
The articles here answer the three questions we get most. Fee structures: booth rent versus percentage splits versus the hybrids, with real numbers for each model and where each one breaks. Card fees: the math on per-transaction processing fees, and why a POS that charges them is quietly taking a vendor-sized cut of your year. And sales tax: combined state and local rates for booth-based consignment operators, state by state — because getting tax wrong is the most expensive mistake on this page.
Money and operations are the same subject viewed from opposite ends of the hallway, and month-end settlement is where they meet. Read this collection alongside the operations hub — and when your vendors ask where their payout number comes from, the vendor-side hub is written for exactly that conversation.
Articles in this collection
Antique-mall sales tax by state — 2026 combined rates for booth-based consignment operators
What combined sales-tax rate to charge at the register in each U.S. state, what tax-exempt resale customers look like for an antique mall, and why setting the rate wrong at signup is the single most common preventable error operators make in year one.
Antique-mall consignment fee structures — booth rent, percentage splits, and the hybrid models in 2026
Five fee structures, the tradeoffs each makes between vendor retention and revenue predictability, and how to pick the right one for a new mall — plus how to switch existing vendors over if you're already running the wrong model.
An antique-mall POS that doesn't charge per-transaction fees — and the math on why it matters
Vintique charges $0 per-transaction processing fees because we don't process cards at all — your existing terminal does. Here's why that matters at a 70-booth mall, the math on what bundled-processing platforms cost over a year, and how to keep your current terminal.
Open a free 45-day workspace, import your CSV exports, and run a real Saturday simulation against your current POS. No card required.
Keep reading in other collections
Antique-mall operations — playbooks, layout, settlement
Antique-mall operations is the day-to-day work of running a booth-based consignment floor: laying out booths, managing the shared register, ringing sales across dozens of split arrangements, and settling with every vendor at month-end. Done well, it is quiet. Done badly, it costs you dealers, walk-in traffic, and margin — usually in that order.
The vendor side — onboarding, payouts, communication
Antique-mall vendor management is the operator's half of a two-sided bargain: onboard dealers cleanly, track every booth's sales, pay out the right number on time, and give vendors enough visibility that they stop calling the counter to ask what sold. This collection covers that whole surface.