How to compare marketplace fees the right way

Every reseller eventually tries to work out which platform is cheapest, finds a comparison table, and makes a decision on a single percentage. That number is almost always the least informative part of the answer.

We are deliberately not printing any rates here. They change, they vary by category, they vary by country, and a stale figure in your head is worse than no figure. What follows is the method — check the current numbers on each platform's own fee page when you use it.

Four things a headline rate hides

What the percentage applies to. Some platforms take their cut of the item price. Some take it of the item price plus shipping. Some include tax in the base. The same headline rate produces materially different outcomes depending on which, and the difference grows with shipping cost.

Payment processing. Sometimes bundled into the headline rate, sometimes a separate line with its own percentage and a fixed amount per transaction. The fixed part is what makes low-value items disproportionately expensive, and it never appears in a comparison table.

Who pays shipping, and what it really costs. A platform with a higher rate and genuinely cheaper postage can be the cheaper place to sell. Compare total cost to get an item to a buyer, not fee against fee.

Promoted listing and discount costs. If a platform effectively requires promotion to get visibility in your category, that is a fee. It just arrives under a different name and is optional in theory only.

The comparison that is actually useful

Take one real item you have actually sold. Work out, for each platform, what the buyer paid and what reached your account. The difference is the true cost of selling that item there.

Do it for three items at different price points — something cheap, something mid, something expensive. You will usually find the ranking changes with price, because fixed per-transaction costs dominate at the bottom and percentages dominate at the top. That is the single most useful thing to know and no table will tell you.

Where it leads

Most people discover they have one platform that is better for cheap items and another for expensive ones, which is an argument for listing in both rather than choosing. Reskale crossposts to eBay, Mercari, Depop, Vinted and Discogs from one listing form, so being present in several places is a question of where you want to sell rather than how many times you are willing to type the same description.

Keep the sale price, the fees and the postage as separate figures in your records. If they are one number, this comparison is impossible to do later.