The short, honest version
Independent shops, connected without taking them over.
Pete's Marketplace helps people discover products across small shops. The shop remains the seller, owns the customer relationship, and handles its own checkout. Here is what the marketplace does—and what it does not do.
Shop catalogue last refreshed 4 Nov 2026, 03:00.
Discovery
There is no paid top spot.
The default browse order is a dated, repeatable shuffle. A product’s weight is adjusted by the size of its shop’s catalogue, giving a small shop roughly the same overall opportunity as a large one. Other views say exactly what they do: newest update, price, alphabetical order, or smaller catalogues first.
When you search
Results are ordered by how well they match the words you typed, and by nothing else. A word in a product’s title counts most; then a word in its category; then in its shop’s name; then anywhere else in its description. A title that is exactly what you typed comes first, then titles that begin with it, then titles that hold every word. Apostrophes, punctuation, capital letters and accents make no difference, and a plural finds its singular. Ties go to what is in stock, then to the title A–Z, so the same search gives the same answer each time. Who the shop is, how big it is and what it pays never change the order, and neither does who is searching.
Payments
You buy from the shop itself.
The basket is a route sheet. It groups saved choices by shop and walks you through each shop’s checkout; Pete's Marketplace does not reserve the stock, create the order, or receive the product payment. Shops pay a flat hosting plan, not a percentage of their sales. Payment processors such as Stripe or PayPal still charge their normal fees.
Clearing Out is different: the seller pays Pete's Marketplace a flat $5 to publish up to 25 items for 30 days. A Wanted or custom-make request costs $2 for the same 30-day run. Those are publishing fees, paid by card through Stripe’s hosted checkout, so card details never reach this site; any later deal remains between the people involved.
Customers and updates
The relationship belongs to the shop.
Order details stay in the shop where the purchase happened. If a shop offers “Get shop updates,” that link opens its own newsletter form and the subscriber joins that shop’s list—not a marketplace-wide list. Pete's Marketplace does not create a central customer account.
Privacy
Browse without becoming a profile.
Search and browsing do not require an account. Saved products stay in that browser, and the basket uses only the marketplace session needed to remember its route. There are no advertising trackers, bidding profiles, or sales of browsing behaviour.
One more cookie, our own: when a visit arrives from another site or from a link we tagged, this site remembers where it came from and the page it landed on, for 30 days. It is read only if you go on to open a shop here, so we can tell which of our own posts and pages bring sellers; it is never shared with advertisers. Browsers that send Global Privacy Control are not given it.
Searches are counted, not read. To know how often a search finds nothing, this site adds one to a daily number for each search, with how many results it found in three bands: none, one to three, four or more. The words you searched for, your address and your browser are not part of that number and are not kept anywhere. Programs, such as search engines’ crawlers, are not counted.
Moderation
Opt-in first, then review.
A shop must opt in from its own admin, then be approved by the market operator. Automated tripwires hold risky or placeholder listings for a person to review; an operator can block a product from this marketplace without changing the seller’s own site. Closed, suspended, or unreachable shops stop appearing until they are serving again.
Clearing Out posts and Wanted requests go live the moment Stripe confirms the fee; a person looks first only when a safety check trips, and nothing is charged for a listing we cannot post. Contact email addresses stay out of the public page; interested people use a rate-limited relay form instead.
Independence
A front door, not a landlord.
Every shop has its own address, branding, policies, exports, admin, payment account, and customer records. Leaving the marketplace does not take any of those things away. Marketplace catalogue data is a disposable read-only copy and is refreshed from each shop.