eBay fee calculator

How eBay's final value fee actually works

eBay charges one final value fee when your item sells. For most categories that is 13.6% of the total amount of the sale — item price plus the shipping you charge — up to $7,500 per item, and 2.35% on any portion above that. The tier is per item, not per order, and it exists so that a single very expensive sale is not charged the full rate on the whole amount.

On top of the percentage, every order carries a small per-order fee: $0.30 on orders of $10 or less, $0.40 on orders above it. It is flat, so like Etsy's fixed fees it weighs most on cheap items — on a $6 order it is five per cent on its own.

The calculator runs the tiered arithmetic automatically, so a sale above $7,500 is split correctly rather than charged a blended guess. Most sellers will never see the upper tier; the ones who do are usually selling equipment, instruments or collectibles, where the difference between 13.6% and 2.35% on the portion above the threshold is worth hundreds.

Read next:The same sale on all six marketplaces

The insertion fee nobody budgets for

Listing is free for your first 250 listings each calendar month. After that, each listing costs $0.35 — charged at listing time, sale or no sale, and charged again when a Good 'Til Cancelled listing renews into a new month.

That allowance is genuinely generous next to the rest of this cluster: Etsy charges $0.20 for every listing with no free tier at all. But the allowance is also a cliff rather than a slope. A seller with 240 active listings pays nothing to list; the same seller at 320 listings pays about $25 a month, and will often not notice until the invoice arrives, because nothing about the listing flow announces it.

It is not in the per-sale breakdown above for the same reason Etsy's listing fee is not: it is a portfolio cost, not a sale cost. Divide your monthly insertion line by your monthly orders if you want it folded into your real take rate.

Why 13.6% is not comparable to 13.6% elsewhere

This is the single most common mistake in marketplace fee comparisons, and it runs in eBay's favour. A seller looks at Etsy's 6.5% transaction fee, then at eBay's 13.6% final value fee, and concludes eBay is twice as expensive. It is not, because Etsy's number is not the whole fee.

Add Etsy's 3% + $0.25 of payment processing and the two land far closer together than the headline rates suggest. Run the identical sale through the hub below and the gap on a mid-priced item is a couple of points rather than the chasm the headline rates suggest. Depop is the outlier that makes the point from the other direction: its selling fee is 0% and its processing is 3.3% + $0.45, so its headline rate tells you almost nothing about what it actually costs.

Where eBay genuinely is expensive is the top of the range: 13.6% plus $0.40 is more than Etsy's all-in on most orders and roughly double Shopify's card processing. What that buys is the largest general-goods buyer base of the six, and a category structure that sells used and refurbished items the others mostly do not want.

Read next:Compare with EtsyOne sale, six marketplaces

What moves the number, and what does not

Category matters. Most categories sit at 13.6%, but several run lower — sneakers above a price threshold, musical instruments, and a handful of others — and store subscribers get discounted rates in many categories. Seller performance matters too: falling to Below Standard adds penalty percentage points on top of the normal rate. This calculator models the standard no-store, most-categories case, which is where most casual and small sellers live.

What does not move the number is the shipping split. The final value fee reads item plus shipping, so a $40 item with $8 postage and a $48 item with free postage cost exactly the same in fees. Choose between them on how the offer converts, not on tax arithmetic.

Nor does the payment method. There is no PayPal fee to add and no processor to shop around for — managed payments is the only route, and its cost is the rate you already see.

Where the fee stops and your listing starts

The fee is eBay's decision and it does not move. What does move is whether the item is found at all, and on eBay that is mostly two fields: the title, which is capped far shorter than sellers expect, and item specifics, which are the structured attributes eBay's filters and its search ranking actually read.

eBay is also the one marketplace in this group with no tag field whatsoever. Everything a tag would do elsewhere has to happen inside the title and the specifics, which is why an eBay listing written by copying an Etsy listing almost always underperforms — the keywords that lived in thirteen tags have nowhere to go.

That is a different job from this calculator, and it is the job the rest of this site does.

Read next:Check your eBay title against the capThe eBay item specifics guideNo views on eBay? Diagnose it

Free on this page, and what the eBay generator writes

The fee is the marketplace's decision and it does not move. What the listing says is yours, and that is the part this site was built to write.

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