Seller how-to
How to sell a cycad
Everything from finishing your seller profile to releasing the plant to your buyer. You can come back to this any time from Help centre or your dashboard.
1
Finish your seller profile first
- Open Start selling and work through the steps: your contact details and address, your seller or nursery details, permits, banking details, and the invoice details we print on the invoice your buyer receives.
- All of it is compulsory before your first listing goes live. Listing stays locked until it is done.
- Your bank details are encrypted, seen only by you and our admin team, and confirmed by an admin before the first payment. Changing them starts a 24 hour hold.
2
Photograph the plant properly
- Shoot in even daylight, out of harsh sun, with a plain background.
- Take the whole plant, the caudex from two sides, the crown from above, a close-up of the leaflets and the leaf base, and anything damaged.
- Include a tape measure or a known object for scale. The first photo becomes the cover of your listing.
- If you ask for verification, there is a guided photo checklist that tells you exactly what the expert needs.
3
Create the listing
- Choose what you are selling: a plant, a batch of seeds, or suckers.
- Pick the species and form, or mark it unknown if you would like an expert to confirm it.
- For plants add caudex height and diameter, overall height, sex, origin, age and condition. Seeds ask for quantity, suckers for whether they are raw or established.
- Write an honest description including provenance and history. Wild-collected plants may not be traded on Cycad Central.
- Attach your permit — nurseries the selling permit, private sellers the possession permit, or declare that none is available.
- Set your price, the sale type (fixed price, open to offers or auction), how long it runs, and your province, city and handover method.
- Submit. You get a permanent number in the form CC-XXXXX and the listing waits briefly for review.
4
Verification is optional
- Tick Request verification on the listing, or ask for it later from My plants.
- An independent expert with no stake in your sale reviews your photos, measurements and provenance and records a decision with a confidence score.
- If more is needed you get a request in your inbox. Once verified, a Cycad Certificate with a registered number is stored permanently against the plant.
- Verified plants may sell for more, but nothing about your listing depends on it.
5
Run an auction
- From My plants choose Send to auction and pick 15 minutes, 24 hours or 48 hours.
- Set your starting price, the minimum bid increment, and optionally a reserve you can keep hidden or show.
- Bidding opens immediately. Late bids extend the clock so nobody wins by sniping.
- At close the highest bid above the reserve wins and an order is created automatically. If the reserve is not met you can send a second chance offer to the top bidder.
6
Getting paid
- The buyer pays in two transfers using the order reference: the Cycad Central fee — 5% on sales up to R5,000 or 2.5% on sales over R5,000 — paid by the seller out of the sale price — and the rest straight into your own bank account. Expert verification is free for now.
- Money never sits with Cycad Central — your share arrives directly from the buyer.
- Once the money is actually in your account, tap “Money received — close the sale” on the order. The plant is marked sold straight away. Cycad Central follows up its fee separately.
- The buyer then has 14 days to collect (we remind them after 7 days) and taps “I received it — complete”. Never hand over a plant before your money is in.
7
Invoices, ratings and records
- Two invoices are created automatically the moment the sale completes: ours to the buyer for the fee, and yours to the buyer for the plant, using the invoice details you supplied.
- The buyer confirms the plant arrived and you can rate each other.
- Sold plants are archived with all photos and details, and the certificate page stays viewable so the plant's history follows it.
- If anything goes wrong, raise a dispute on the order rather than settling it off the platform.