Marketplace Seller Fees: Amazon, eBay and Etsy Compared

Price a $58.00 tool against eBay's 13.6% final value fee and you will budget $7.89 for the platform. The invoice reads $10.27.

Nothing has gone wrong in that gap. The 13.6% is simply not charged against $58.00. eBay's selling fees page defines the base — it calls it the total amount of sale — as item price plus handling charges plus shipping paid by the buyer plus sales tax plus other applicable fees. Add $9.85 of shipping and $4.75 of the buyer's state sales tax and the base is $72.60. The sales tax rides inside it: money eBay collects and remits, that the seller never holds for a second, and that costs $0.65 in fee by itself.

$2.38 on one order is about 4% of the item price. Carried across a season of listings, it is the whole difference between a fee you priced in and a fee that surprises you.

The number they multiply is not the number on your listing

Run one order through all three schedules. Item $58.00, shipping $9.85, buyer's sales tax $4.75.

Three bases for the same order. eBay pulls sales tax into the percentage. Etsy splits the difference: its help centre describes the 6.5% transaction fee as applying to the order total with shipping and gift wrap, and describes the processing fee as taken from the total sale price including any applicable sales tax. Amazon's total-price footnote names list price, shipping and gift wrapping, and names nothing else.

Etsy looks like the cheap column here. It is also the only one of the three that can add a 15% advertising fee after the sale, on an order you did not know was advertised.

Amazon's referral fee is a table, not a rate

There is no such thing as the Amazon fee. The pricing page carries thirty-seven product categories, eleven of them change rate partway up the price, and the flat rates alone run from 8% on Computers to 45% on Amazon Device Accessories. From Amazon's "How much does it cost to sell on Amazon?" pricing page, read 2026-08-19:

Watch the Clothing row. A shirt at $20.00 pays 10%, or $2.00. The same shirt at $20.50 pays 17%, or $3.49. Fifty cents of price bought a dollar and a half of fee, and nothing in the listing flow tells you that you crossed a line.

Two of the tiered rows run the other way, and they are worth knowing before you price high. Jewelry drops from 20% to 5% on the portion above $250.00; Watches from 16% to 3% on the portion above $1,500.00. Electronics Accessories and Compact Appliances do the same thing at $100.00 and $300.00. The reduced rate applies to the portion, not to the whole order, so the marginal dollar gets cheaper while the first one never does.

The page also carries a note most sellers meet the hard way: "A product's fee category may not be the same as the category that appears to customers in the Amazon store." That one sentence is why sellers end up arguing about a rate they never chose.

Then the plan sits on top: $0.99 per item sold on the Individual plan, or $39.99 a month on the Professional plan. Divide, and the crossover lands at 41 items in a calendar month. Below that the arithmetic favours Individual — and the arithmetic is the only thing being compared here, because the Professional plan carries tools Individual does not.

eBay's percentage moves with your defect record

This is the part of eBay's schedule that belongs on a site about recourse rather than a site about pricing. How you handle disputes feeds straight back into what you pay on everything else you sell.

From eBay's "Selling fees" help page, read 2026-08-19:

• Base final value fee, most categories: 13.6% of total amount of sale up to $7,500 per item and 2.35% above that, plus a per-order charge of $0.30 at $10.00 or under and $0.40 above $10.00.
• Category rates diverge more than most sellers assume. Books and magazines, movies and TV, and music run 15.3%. Coins and paper money excluding bullion, comic books and memorabilia, non-sport and sports trading cards, and collectible card games run 13.25%. Sneakers sold at $150 or more are 8%, with no per-order charge at all.
• Insertion fee: 250 zero-insertion-fee listings a month, then $0.35 each, charged whether or not the item sells.
• Below standard on the monthly evaluation on the 20th: an extra 6% on next month's final value fees, rising to 7% after four or more consecutive months, until the account climbs back to Above Standard.
• Very high item-not-as-described return rate in a category: an extra 5% on next month's sales in that category, rising to 6% after four or more consecutive months. If both penalties land at once, eBay charges only the below-standard one.
• Dispute fee: $20.00, excluding sales tax, per dispute where the seller is found responsible for the disputed amount.
• International fee: 1.65% of the total amount of sale where the delivery address or the buyer's registered address is outside the US and eBay International Shipping is not used. Seller currency conversion charge for US-registered sellers: 3%.

Those extra percentages are calculated on the total amount of sale, the same base as the base rate. A below-standard month therefore means 19.6% instead of 13.6% in most categories, on everything, for a month. That is not a warning with a fee attached. It is six points of margin, charged for a performance number you cannot correct until the next evaluation comes round.

And a $20.00 dispute fee on a $28 order is most of the order. Which way to push a given case depends on which of the four money-back routes you are actually in, and on who is holding the pen in a card dispute versus a platform case.

Etsy publishes its fees in two places, and only one of them opened

Etsy's legal Fees & Payments Policy at etsy.com/legal/fees answered every plain request on 2026-08-19 with a bot-protection page. Its help centre did not, so the figures below come from Etsy's own help articles, read live that day, with the article named for each. Where the legal policy is the only source for a point, I have said so.

• Listing fee: $0.20 per listing, charged when you publish and again on each auto-renewal, regardless of whether the item sells. A listing expires after four months. Sell two variations out of one listing and you owe another $0.20 for the extra quantity. (Etsy Fee Basics)
• Transaction fee: 6.5% of the total order amount, applied to shipping and gift wrap as well as to the item. The help article does not name sales tax in that base; the US carve-out is spelled out only in the Fees & Payments Policy, which would not open. (What are the Fees and Taxes for Selling on Etsy?)
• Payment processing, US bank account: 3% + $0.25 USD, "taken from the item's total sale price, including its shipping fees, and any applicable sales tax." The rate follows where your bank account is, not where the buyer is: the UK is 4% + £0.20, Canada 3% + C$0.25 on domestic and US orders, Japan 6.0% + $0.30. (What are Payment Processing Fees for Selling on Etsy?)
• The Offsite Ads rate depends on a threshold you cross once and never come back from. A shop that has never made $10,000 USD in any consecutive 365-day period pays 15% of an attributed order and may opt out. Once it has made $10,000, the rate falls to 12% and participation becomes compulsory for the lifetime of the shop. Either way the fee is capped at $100 USD per order. (How Etsy's Offsite Ads Work)
• Etsy Plus: $10 USD a month. Pattern: $15.00 USD a month after a 30-day free trial, non-refundable and renewing until cancelled.
• Nine countries carry a Regulatory Operating fee on item price plus shipping and gift wrap, and the rate is set by where the seller is: Canada 0.50%, France 1.14%, Hungary 1.97%, India 0.05%, Italy 0.80%, Spain 0.88%, Türkiye 1.67%, United Kingdom 0.48%, Vietnam 1.24%. A US-based seller pays none of it, which is worth knowing before you copy a fee breakdown written for a British shop. (What is a Regulatory Operating Fee?)

The attribution rule is the one that bites. An order counts as attributed if the buyer bought from your shop within 30 days of clicking an Etsy-bought ad, and one click can attribute several separate orders. Run that against the order above: $67.85 at 15% is $10.18 of advertising fee stacked on the $7.04 already gone. The cheapest column in the table becomes the most expensive one, decided by a click you never saw and cannot audit.

Fees do not fully unwind when the money does

This is the part the fee calculators skip, and eBay is the platform that publishes enough of it to plan around.

Its fee credits page, read 2026-08-19, credits the variable final value fee in every refund and cancellation scenario it lists. The per-order fixed charge is the line that moves. You get it back when the buyer asked to cancel, when there was a problem with their delivery address, when a remorse return runs its course — ordered by mistake, does not fit, changed their mind, found it cheaper — and when you issue a full refund through eBay's own Send refund flow. You do not get it back when you cancelled because the item was out of stock or damaged, when the return was not-as-described, when the buyer reported the item never arrived, when you offered a partial refund without asking for the item back, or when you accepted a payment dispute and refunded in full.

Partial refunds are credited by proportion, and eBay's own worked example states it plainly: a $68.05 order refunded $5.49 including the tax portion works out at 8.1% of the payment, so 8.1% of each eligible fee comes back — $0.75 against a $9.25 final value fee, with the $0.40 per-order charge not eligible at all.

Etsy splits along a different seam. The payment processing fee is credited proportionally against a refund; the help article says so directly. The $0.20 listing fee is not, and never was. It is charged for publishing rather than for selling, and it renews every four months whether anything happens or not.

Amazon returns the referral fee on a refund and keeps a refund administration fee. Seller Central has a help page under exactly that title, and it stays shut: the page renders nothing outside a logged-in session, and the Internet Archive's captures of it are the same empty shell. Third-party pages quote the amount as the lesser of $5.00 or 20% of the applicable referral fee. Treat that as hearsay — it is not verified at source here — open the page inside your own account and check it against a real settlement line before you build it into a price. On the FBA side there is a separate returns processing fee, which Amazon's Fulfillment by Amazon page describes only as "charged on orders when Amazon provides a customer with free return shipping." The rate card behind that sentence is not on any public page reachable without a login.

So a refunded $58 sale is not a $0 event. Gone are the outbound label, the per-order charge if the refund fell on the wrong side of eBay's list, the listing fee, and whatever the return shipping cost. Put that number next to the work of assembling a representment packet before deciding which cases are worth fighting.

The store subscription line has a break-even you can compute

eBay Store subscriptions, from eBay's "Store selling fees" help page, read 2026-08-19: Starter $7.95 on monthly renewal or $4.95 on annual, Basic $27.95 or $21.95, Premium $74.95 or $59.95, Anchor $349.95 or $299.95.

Starter does not touch your final value fee. Subscribers on that tier stay at 13.6% in most categories, and the store page gives them their own table saying so. Basic and above move most categories to 12.7%, while the per-order charge stays where it was. That spread is 0.9 percentage points, so Basic at $27.95 breaks even at about $3,106 of total amount of sale a month, and at about $2,439 on annual renewal. Below that line a Basic Store is a cost centre unless you need the larger listing allowance.

One detail hides in the same table and cuts the other way. The store rate applies to the total amount of sale up to $2,500 per item and drops to 2.35% above it, while without a store the 13.6% runs all the way to $7,500. On a $4,000 item the subscriber pays far less. On forty $60 items the difference is those 0.9 points and nothing else.

The number that settles this is on your payout report, not here

Pick one order from your most recent settlement and rebuild it line by line: gross, each fee row, tax collected, shipping charged, label paid. Then set that total against the rate you had in your head when you priced the item. The gap will not look dramatic on one order. It is the same gap on every order.

None of these pages carries a change log, so this one gets reopened every 180 days — next check due around 2027-02-15.

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Read on 2026-08-19: Amazon's "How much does it cost to sell on Amazon?" pricing page, including the full thirty-seven-row referral fee table and its footnotes, and Amazon's "Fulfillment by Amazon" page; eBay's "Selling fees" (id=4822), "Store selling fees" (id=4809) and "Fee credits" (id=4128) help pages; and Etsy's help centre articles Etsy Fee Basics, What are the Fees and Taxes for Selling on Etsy?, What are Payment Processing Fees for Selling on Etsy?, How Etsy's Offsite Ads Work, What is a Regulatory Operating Fee?, What is Etsy Plus? and Pricing and Fees for Pattern. Etsy's legal Fees & Payments Policy would not open at all, which leaves the sales-tax treatment of the 6.5% transaction fee as the one Etsy point here I could not confirm at source.

Two Amazon figures stayed out of reach and are flagged where they appear: the exact amount of the refund administration fee, whose help page needs a Seller Central login, and the FBA returns processing rate card, which is not on any public page I could reach.

I read fee schedules because they decide what is left after a sale, not because I do anyone's accounting. Your settlement report is the only document that binds a marketplace to a number, and it is the one to argue from when a figure here does not match what you were charged.