This is intended. The market fee is not returned to you on order cancellation.

It’s to prevent spam and possibly to encourage cutting out the middle man and trading directly

Oh I just figured out the reason. It’s so people don’t overprice resources. So it works by punishing people for selling their resources at above market price since if they charge 30 when the price is hovering around 7.3 then no one is going to buy it and they just lose a bunch of money. It’s really smart I’m surprised I didn’t realize the purpose it had earlier the CoW Dev team gets +10 respect points from me for being clever. Great game design simple yet effective.

It's too expensive to do big sales, especially if afterward you want to cancel them. It's better to make smaller offers 1 or 2k at a time and you only put a new order when the first is sold. Also using the market is the fastest way to go broke. You can't do everything at the same time so you need to make choices and prioritize. Specialize on one unit troop type a city so that you don't waste resources on buildings, only research the units that you will actually produce. Do you want a strong economy first of do you prefer to have a bigger army early on and so a higher daily upkeep. Stack your units so you don't lose them needlesly and have to replace them. All the small things add up in the end.

It's actually a huge design mistake... no market EVER charges for bid or sell ORDERS, the only moment money is charged is when the transaction actually takes place... nowhere in the world, except at Bytro. It leads to stagnating markets, because people don't want to put orders out in fear that they won't be executed.

The reason it was implemented wasn't for realism, it was to prevent people from putting huge amounts of resources on the market to use it as a "bank" so that they would never run out.

There's such a thing like taxes that need to be payed when you conduct transactions. Furthermore in wartime you need a license to sell your goods and surely a bribe would be involved. In wartime not all the products that you have sold will arrive on destination so it's all calculated in there.

However, it was done because many players were parking resources on the market on extreme high prices. They did it to secure their resources against spies actions and not to lose them to the enemy when they get invaded. Many players went inactive as you can imagine and their orders stayed on the market. As the AI sell their resources on the average market price this tactic inflated the market prices highly. So they added the 10 tax on all resources both selling and buying. Which we always do until today, you buy something you pay VAT, that's how it is.

I don't have a problem with paying when the transaction is done; it is the ORDER which should be free.

There were different ways to solve the "bank" problem.

It sounds like there is a flaw in the 'looting' someone's capital mechanic, and instead of fixing that, Bytro chose to break the market instead.

Yeah, they should make it so orders on the market aren't "reserved". If the Germans took over the Poles and found huge amounts of money that were "supposed" to be sold, then they would keep it, and the order would be removed.

Yea it should be that the country takes your resources that are for sale.