April 2026 · 7 min read
Every online marketplace charges fees. It's how they stay in business — they provide the platform, the buyers, and the payment processing, and they take a percentage of each sale in return. Understanding how these fees work is the difference between selling at a profit and selling at a loss.
When you sell on eBay, Poshmark, or Mercari, you're renting access to their audience. Millions of buyers browse these platforms every day — and that traffic is what makes your items sell. Fees pay for:
Not every platform charges every fee type, but here are the main categories you'll encounter:
A charge just for posting an item. Etsy charges $0.20 per listing (renewed every 4 months or when sold). eBay gives you up to 250 free listings per month, then charges $0.35 each. Most other platforms have no listing fees.
The main fee — a percentage of your sale taken by the platform. This is where the biggest variation exists:
The cost of handling the money — credit card processing, fraud prevention, and payouts to your bank. Typically around 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. Some platforms bundle this into the commission (Poshmark, Mercari). Others charge it separately (Etsy, Depop, Grailed).
Optional but increasingly common. eBay's Promoted Listings charge 2–15% of the sale price when a buyer clicks your ad and purchases within 30 days. Etsy's Offsite Ads charge 12–15% on sales driven by Etsy's Google/Facebook advertising (mandatory for shops earning $10K+/year).
This is where it gets tricky. Different platforms calculate fees on different amounts:
This is why "free shipping" can sometimes be more profitable than buyer-paid shipping — if you build the shipping cost into the item price, you may pay the same fees either way, but buyers prefer seeing "Free Shipping."
The most expensive platforms aren't always the ones with the highest single fee — they're the ones where multiple fees stack on top of each other.
Example: Selling a $50 item + $8 shipping on Etsy
Listing fee: $0.20
Transaction fee (6.5% of $58): $3.77
Payment processing (3% + $0.25): $1.99
Offsite ads (if applicable, 15%): $8.70
Total fees: $5.96 without ads, $14.66 with ads
That's 10.3% without offsite ads and 25.3% with them — on a platform that advertises a "6.5% fee." This is why comparing platforms by their headline fee rate is misleading.
Sell a $100 item on five different platforms and you'll get five different payouts. The differences come from:
This is exactly why we built FeePilot — to show you the actual take-home amount across all platforms, side by side, so you can sell where it makes the most sense.
Enter your item price, shipping cost, and item cost — and see exactly what you'll keep on every marketplace.
We'll email you when any marketplace updates their seller fees. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.