What is each percentage charged on?
This is where most calculators go wrong, because each platform uses a different base:
- eBay US: the whole sale, meaning item price, the postage the buyer pays and the sales tax.
- eBay UK business sellers: the item price and postage (UK prices already hold VAT).
- Etsy: the transaction fee is on the price and postage but, for US sellers, not on sales tax; the payment processing fee is on the whole payment, tax included.
- Whatnot: commission on the item price only; payment processing on the whole order, postage and tax included.
- Mercari: the item price plus the postage the buyer pays.
- Grailed: the price plus postage, or the price alone with a Grailed label.
- Poshmark, StockX and GOAT: the sale price.
- PayPal, Stripe, Square and Shopify: the whole payment.
Steps and thresholds
Some fees change with the size of the sale. eBay’s per-order fee rises above $10 (or £10); eBay charges less on the part of a sale over $7,500; Poshmark switches from a flat fee to 20% at $15 (at exactly $15 we follow its help page and show a note); Grailed’s rate steps up at $120. Some categories charge one rate on the whole sale picked by its size, others a rate on each slice. The reverse calculator searches each side of every step, so it finds the lowest price that gets you to your amount.
Fees the buyer pays
eBay UK’s Buyer Protection fee, Mercari’s Buyer Protection fee, Depop’s Marketplace fee and Vinted’s fee are paid by the buyer, on top of the price. We show them as what your buyer pays and never take them from your total.
Postage
Where you charge postage and buy the label yourself, it counts as money in and money out. Where the platform sells the buyer the label (Poshmark, Vinted, Whatnot, StockX and GOAT), postage is neither yours to keep nor yours to pay, so we leave it out of your profit (Whatnot still charges processing on it).
Rounding and dates
Each fee is rounded to the cent (or penny), as the platforms charge it, and the total is the sum of the rounded fees. Fee changes with a start date are stored with that date; the calculators use the rate for the day you open them.
What we leave out
Each calculator lists what it leaves out under its results: for example eBay’s Below Standard surcharge, Amazon’s fulfilment (FBA) fees, VAT on platform fees in the UK, and anything we could not read on the platform’s page, which says “not included yet”. Nothing here is financial or tax advice.
Every fee, its source page and the date we read it are in the fee table on each calculator, and on the fee changes page. Plain-text copies for AI tools: data.txt and llms.txt.