Every antique mall owner sets this once and then lives with it for years. Charge rent for the space, take a percentage of what sells, or do both. The decision looks like a pricing question. It is really a question about who carries the risk in a slow month.
Vendors have plenty of material telling them what a booth should cost. Owners have almost none telling them what to charge. Here is the math, the trade-offs, and the parts that only show up after you have run the model for a year.
Booth rent. The vendor pays a fixed monthly amount for the space. What they sell is their own business. Your revenue is predictable and arrives whether the booth moves merchandise or sits untouched.
Commission. The vendor pays nothing to occupy the space. You take an agreed percentage of every sale. Your revenue rises and falls with theirs.
Hybrid. A lower fixed rent plus a smaller percentage. Most established malls land here eventually, usually without having planned to.
Take one 10×10 booth. Compare $250 a month straight rent, a flat 20% commission, and a hybrid of $150 rent plus 10%. Then run that booth at three different sales levels.
| Booth sells | Rent only ($250) | Commission only (20%) | Hybrid ($150 + 10%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| $400 | $250 | $80 | $190 |
| $1,200 | $250 | $240 | $270 |
| $3,000 | $250 | $600 | $450 |
Rent wins the bad month. Commission wins the good one. The crossover sits at $1,250 in sales, because $250 divided by 20% is $1,250. That is the only number you need to run this comparison for your own rates: divide your rent by your commission rate and you have the sales figure where the two models pay you the same.
Now look at the same three columns from the vendor's side of the table.
| Booth sells | Rent only | Commission only | Hybrid |
|---|---|---|---|
| $400 | $150 | $320 | $210 |
| $1,200 | $950 | $960 | $930 |
| $3,000 | $2,750 | $2,400 | $2,550 |
A strong vendor keeps more under rent. A struggling one keeps more under commission. This is why rent-only malls tend to accumulate strong dealers and lose weak ones, and commission malls do the reverse. Your pricing model quietly selects your vendor roster.
Under straight rent, you get paid the same whether a booth is beautifully merchandised or has not been touched since March. You have no financial stake in that vendor selling anything. Neither does your staff.
Under commission, a dead booth costs you directly, which is uncomfortable and also useful. It is the reason commission malls tend to be pickier about who gets space and more willing to move a vendor to a worse corner.
Hybrid splits the difference on purpose. The rent covers your fixed costs so a bad month does not put you underwater, and the percentage keeps you interested in whether the booth performs.
This is the part that gets left out of most rate decisions. If you are on straight rent and absorbing processing fees, card costs scale with sales while your revenue does not.
Run it on that $1,200 booth. If roughly 70% of sales are on cards and you are paying around 3%, that booth cost you about $25 in processing. Against $250 rent, you just gave back 10% of your revenue on a booth you thought was fixed-price. At $3,000 in sales it is $63 against the same $250.
You have three honest options: raise rent to cover it, add a card-fee offset as a recurring charge, or move the fee to the tender where it happens. Vendor Choice Pricing takes the third route and lets each vendor decide for themselves rather than forcing the whole store onto one policy. A $20.00 item tags at $20.79, the customer pays $20.79 on a card or $20.00 in cash, and the cashier does not calculate anything.
Whatever you choose, choose deliberately. Absorbing card fees silently under a rent model is the most common way a mall's margin erodes without anyone noticing.
Every mall that has been open more than a few years has them. The dealer who has been in booth 3 since you opened, on terms you would never offer today, who you do not particularly want to renegotiate with.
That is a normal way to run a business. It becomes a problem only when your system cannot express it, and you end up keeping the real arrangement on a sticky note while the software reports something else.
Set a store rate, then override it per vendor. The exception lives in the ledger instead of in your head, and your settlement numbers stay true without anyone remembering to adjust them.
Someone takes a booth on the 14th. What do you charge?
There is no correct answer, which is exactly why the software should not pick one for you. Half a month is defensible. A full month is defensible if you turned away someone else to hold the space. Nothing until the 1st is defensible if you want them in and settled.
What is not defensible is a system that invents a fraction and posts it before you have agreed to it. Decide the charge, then have the ledger record what you decided.
Whichever way you go, check that whatever you run the mall on can actually express it:
That last one catches people. A vendor with $180 in sales and $250 in rent owes you $70. If your system quietly zeroes that out, you are financing your vendors and calling it a rounding error. Over a year across forty booths, that is real money.
If your building costs are fixed and high, and you cannot afford a soft quarter, rent protects you. If you are filling a new mall and need dealers in the door, commission lowers their risk enough to get them to say yes. If you have been open a while and want both a floor and a stake in performance, hybrid is where you will end up anyway.
What matters more than the model is that the numbers it produces are defensible to the vendor standing at your counter asking why their check is smaller this month. That conversation goes well or badly depending on whether you can show them the line items, not on which model you chose.
If you want to see what that looks like against your own rates, bring your current rate sheet to a demo. Thirty minutes, and bring the vendor arrangement you think no software can handle — that is the useful one to test.