Publishing your first listing

Go to Listings → + New listing. The form is one page in six sections, with a panel down the side tracking what’s still missing.

Your work saves itself. A draft is created as soon as the listing has a title, and every change after that saves on its own. You can leave and come back.

What goes in each section

What it looks like. Up to 10 photos (JPEG, PNG or WebP, 20MB each) and up to 2 short videos. The first photo is the one shoppers see in search, so make it the strongest. Use real photos of the piece: mockups, renders and AI-generated or AI-enhanced images aren’t allowed, including AI backgrounds and upscaling.

About. Your title, category, tags and description. The description runs to 500 characters, which is enough for dimensions, materials and care instructions if you’re disciplined about it.

Search for where your piece belongs, or take one of the suggestions we pull from your title. If nothing fits, choose Can’t find it? Describe it, pick the nearest category and say what it is in a few words. It shows under that category while we work out where it should live, and if a better home turns up we’ll show it beside the category when you open the listing, with a button to move it there.

A few subcategories ask you to confirm something before a listing can go in them. Art prints is one: you tick to say each print is signed or stamped and posted by you.

Tags: up to 13, each up to 20 characters. Skip your category and subcategory names. We already search on those.

How it’s made. The making process, your materials, and photos or video of the work in progress. More on this below.

Price & stock. Your price, from £1 up, and how many you have.

Delivery. How many days you need before you post it, whether the shopper pays postage or it’s free, and which postage method applies. The delivery time comes from the postage method you pick, which every listing needs, free postage included.

Options. Variants, personalisation. Variants are the same item in set choices, like a colour or a size, and each choice can carry its own price. Personalisation is something the shopper types or uploads, like a name or a photo. You can have five of each.

The distinction matters legally as well as practically: a personalised item is exempt from change-of-mind returns, a variant isn’t.

How it’s made

Every listing on Luma carries a making disclosure. It’s the thing that makes this marketplace different from the ones where "handmade" is a search term.

Making process is required, minimum 10 characters, though 10 characters isn’t the point. Describe what you actually do.

Good:

• "Each piece is hand-thrown on a pottery wheel and glazed with a food-safe stoneware glaze."
• "I cut, stitch and finish every bag by hand, using a domestic sewing machine and a leather awl."

Not enough:

• "Handmade."
• "Made by me."

This is what shoppers read in the "How it’s made" section on your listing, and what our team looks at if the listing is ever questioned.

Materials are optional but worth adding. Naming them gets your listing a small lift in search, and it powers the material filter shoppers browse with. Start typing and we’ll suggest from a standard list.

Process photos and video are optional too. Up to 5 stills and a couple of short clips. A clip can be snippets of the work in progress, or you holding the finished piece and talking through where the idea came from and how you made it. It doesn’t need to be a tutorial: shoppers want the story behind the piece and a sense of the time and skill that went in, the way they’d get it chatting to you at a market stall. They earn a small search lift as well.

Before you can publish

For your shop:

• Your shop is cleared to sell on Luma
• Your details are verified with our payment provider (Stripe)
• Your trading name and business address are in
• You’ve added a return address

For the listing itself:

• at least one photo
• a title of at least 5 characters
• a category with a subcategory, or your own words for what it is
• a description
• a making process of 10 characters or more
• a price of at least £1
• a Posts within time, an answer to whether the shopper pays postage, and a postage method with a delivery time

Where the subcategory has a statement to confirm, that’s ticked too. If you make a dropdown required, at least one of its choices has to cost nothing extra, so a shopper can always buy the item at its listed price.

The side panel shows all of this as you work, so you’ll never hit an error you didn’t see coming. Drafts have no requirements at all. You can build the whole thing before any of the shop-level checks are done.

Publishing

Publish puts the listing live now.

Free listings

You can have 10 active listings at no cost. Published and paused listings count, because a paused one is still visible to anyone with the link, and so does one we’ve suspended while you can still appeal. A sold-out listing stays published, so it keeps its slot too. Drafts and deleted listings don’t count.

At the limit, publishing is refused rather than charged for, so delete a listing to free a slot. There’s no fee for listing, only the commission when something sells. See Platform fees explained.

After it’s live

Selling out. If you list a limited number and it sells out, the listing stays up marked sold out for 14 days. After that it drops out of search, browse and your shop page, and stays reachable by its own link and from anyone’s favourites. Add stock at any point and it goes straight back to normal.

Deleting a listing. Deleting archives it rather than wiping it, because order history, receipts and our ability to defend a card dispute all point at it. You can’t delete a listing with an order still in progress on it.

• Archived listings live behind the Archived filter on your listings page.
• Re-activate brings one back paused if it’s been live before and still has everything it needs to publish, or as a draft if it hasn’t. Never straight to published, so you get to look at it first.
• After 180 days archived, and once every order on it is past the window a card payment can be disputed in, it’s permanently deleted.

If you want it seen, Getting found on Luma is the honest version of how search decides what to show.