How to Sell an NFT: Listing Steps, Fees and Listing Services

To sell an NFT, you list it on a marketplace at a price or accept an offer from a buyer. This guide shows the listing steps, what a listing does on the blockchain, what it costs, how creators prepare a collection, and which paid listing services are worth the money.

How to sell an NFT in five steps

The steps below follow OpenSea's help article on selling. Most Ethereum-style marketplaces work in a similar way.

1. Connect the wallet that holds the NFT. The wallet needs a small amount of the chain's token for gas if the marketplace asks for an approval.
2. Find the item. Open your profile, the item page or the collection page, and choose "List item" or switch to sell mode. On OpenSea, you can list several items from the same chain at once.
3. Set the price and duration. You can set a fixed price or match the collection floor price. On OpenSea, a listing can run from 15 minutes to 6 months. A private listing sells only to one wallet address that you enter.
4. Check the fees. The listing screen shows the marketplace fee and any creator earnings, and it can show the amount you receive after fees.
5. Sign the listing in your wallet. The first listing from a collection also asks for an approval transaction, which costs gas.

You can also sell by accepting an offer: a buyer makes an offer on the item or on the whole collection, and you accept it from the item page.

OpenSea states that it never asks a seller to send funds to complete a sale. A "buyer" who sends error screenshots and asks for a payment is a scammer.

What a listing does on the blockchain

On OpenSea and most EVM marketplaces built on the Seaport protocol, a listing is a signed message, not a transaction. The seller signs an order in EIP-712 typed-data format, saying that the seller will transfer a given token for a given price until a given time. The marketplace stores the order in its database and shows it to buyers, and nothing is written to the chain until a buyer fills the order.

The one on-chain step is the approval. Before the first listing from a collection, the seller's wallet calls setApprovalForAll, which lets the marketplace's contract move the seller's tokens from that collection when a sale settles. The approval covers every token the seller holds in the collection, now and later. Phishing sites try to trick people into signing the same kind of approval for a thief's contract.

Cancelling a listing costs gas on OpenSea, because the cancellation is recorded on the blockchain, while lowering the price asks for a new signature in your wallet.

Solana and Bitcoin work differently. On Solana, Magic Eden and Tensor list items with on-chain instructions or by delegating authority over the token account, so a listing can cost a small transaction fee. Bitcoin Ordinals are listed with partially signed Bitcoin transactions (PSBTs).

Where to list an NFT

Aggregators collect listings from several marketplaces into one view, so a listing on a large marketplace often appears on them too. The NFT aggregator guide explains how aggregators work.

How a collection gets listed on a marketplace

Marketplaces scan the chains they support all the time. When an ERC-721 or ERC-1155 contract mints its first token, the marketplace's indexer finds the contract and creates a collection page. Creators should prepare these items before the mint:

• Token metadata. The tokenURI function must return JSON with name, description, image and attributes. Store the files on IPFS with paid pinning or on Arweave, not on a server that can go offline.
• Collection metadata. A contractURI function lets marketplaces read the collection name, banner, description and links from the contract.
• Royalty information. ERC-2981 tells marketplaces the royalty rate and recipient. Many marketplaces made creator earnings optional for most collections in 2023, so a project should not depend on royalty income.
• Verified source code. Verify the contract on the block explorer, because buyers and marketplace trust teams check the code.
• Ownership. Marketplaces let the address returned by the contract's owner() function claim and edit the collection page, so keep the owner key in a hardware wallet or a multisig.

The contract side is covered in NFT smart contract development and NFT minting platform development.

How to list an NFT collection as a creator

1. Finish the pre-mint checks. Store the metadata permanently, test the reveal, verify the contract, set contractURI and royalty information, and secure the owner key.
2. Claim the collection page. Connect the owner wallet on each marketplace you use, then upload the banner, logo, links and category.
3. Set fees and payout addresses where the marketplace lets creators set them.
4. Apply for verification through the marketplace's official form. The criteria usually include trading volume, social presence and identity, and only the marketplace decides.
5. Decide how the first sale runs. Most collections mint from their own site and let holders trade on marketplaces, while a creator selling a single piece lists it at a fixed price or as an auction.
6. Watch for copies. Report copycat collections that use your art, and refresh the metadata after a reveal.

What NFT listing services do

A listing service sells technical setup and monitoring. Reasonable work to pay for includes contract review, metadata generation and pinning, reveal scripts, collection page setup on several marketplaces and monitoring for copycat collections. Promotion is separate work, covered in the NFT marketing agency guide.

NFT market conditions

NFT trading volume fell sharply after its 2021 and 2022 peak and has stayed far lower. Most of the remaining volume goes to a small number of established collections, and a new listing rarely finds buyers through a marketplace's front page. Collections that sell today usually bring their own audience from a game, a brand, a community or a service that exists outside the marketplace.

Frequently asked questions