Hannah BrooksWhat eBay actually takes from your sale
What eBay actually takes from your sale
I sold an iPhone on eBay last year for $400 and watched the deposit show up at something like $343, which is when I started actually paying attention to how the fees stack. The honest answer to "how much does eBay take" is that it depends on what you're selling, what you're charging for shipping, where the buyer lives, and whether you've turned on any of the optional cost centers like promoted listings — but for most casual sellers on most sales, you're losing somewhere between 14% and 17% of the headline number before you've spent anything on packaging or postage.
The bulk of that is the final value fee, which on most consumer goods is 13.25% of the total transaction, plus a flat $0.30 per order. That number includes both the sales commission and payment processing now that eBay handles checkout directly (older guides break the fee into two pieces because PayPal used to handle the money side, and there are still articles online quoting 10% commission and 2.9% processing as if it's two separate things — that's outdated). The "total transaction" wording in there is doing a lot of quiet work, which I'll get to in a second.
How the standard fee plays out on a real sale
Take a $50 pair of sneakers. Buyer pays $50, eBay's percentage works out to $6.62, and then there's the $0.30 flat fee on top of that, so you're left with $43.08 before shipping or supplies enter the picture. That feels reasonable.
Now run the same math on a $1 used DVD. The percentage on that is 13 cents, but the flat $0.30 doesn't shrink along with the price, so you're paying $0.43 in fees on a dollar of revenue and walking away with 57 cents. Anything under about $5 on eBay is, in my experience, basically a donation in disguise once you factor in the time it takes to photograph, list, pack, and ship the thing. There's a price floor below which selling on the platform isn't worth the effort, and most casual sellers significantly underestimate where that floor sits.
Why the percentage applies to shipping and tax too
Most new sellers find this out the hard way: the 13.25% isn't taken out of the item price. It's taken out of the total amount the buyer pays at checkout, which means shipping charges and sales tax both get pulled into the calculation.
This used to be a real loophole. People would list a $200 item for $1.00 with $199 shipping to dodge most of the commission, since shipping was originally fee-free. eBay closed that off years ago by just applying the percentage to everything moving through the transaction. So now if you charge a buyer $10 for shipping, eBay's cut of that is around $1.33, which comes off your bottom line on top of whatever the actual postage cost you. Sales tax is treated the same way — you don't keep any of the tax (eBay collects and remits it directly in most states now, which simplified things from a paperwork standpoint but didn't help the seller economically), but the tax dollars still inflate the number the percentage runs against. So a $50 sale to a buyer in California, where there's a meaningful state sales tax, costs you a couple of cents more in fees than the same sale to a buyer in Oregon, where there isn't one.
What this means in practice is that you can't think about the asking price and the shipping charge as two separate numbers when you're sizing up profit. The buyer experiences them as one transaction and the fee structure does too.
Not every category is 13.25%
The 13.25% number is the default but it isn't universal. Media (books, DVDs, CDs, vinyl, video games) runs higher, around 14.95%. Standard clothing sticks with 13.25%. Consumer electronics is meaningfully lower at about 8% — eBay keeps that one low specifically because they're competing with Swappa and Back Market and Reverb and the rest of the dedicated electronics resale sites, and they'd lose that segment entirely at the standard rate.
Mostly this matters because eBay lets you pick the category during listing, and the auto-suggestion isn't always correct. I've watched friends list audio equipment under "Music" instead of "Consumer Electronics" because the title had the word "stereo" in it, and that mistake costs them about seven percentage points on every sale until they catch it. Always good to double-check the category before you hit list, and to look at the current fee schedule on eBay's site directly — not the help articles, which lag the actual policy by months sometimes, and not third-party blog posts written before the last fee revision.
Insertion fees, and the store subscription question
You get 250 free listings per month. After that the cost is $0.35 per listing, regardless of whether the item ever sells, which is the part new sellers don't always factor in. Insertion fees are conceptually distinct from final value fees — insertion is the cost of putting something on the platform, final value is the cost of selling it. You can rack up the first one without ever paying the second one if your stuff doesn't move.
If you're nowhere near the 250 cap, none of this is your problem. If you're regularly above it, store subscriptions become worth thinking about. The Starter Store is around $4.95 a month and breaks even somewhere around 265 listings; the Basic Store at $21.95 a month makes financial sense at around 315. There are higher tiers (Premium, Anchor, Enterprise) but those are priced for people running a real ecommerce operation, and unless you already know you need them, you don't.
Promoted listings
There are two flavors. Standard is pay-per-sale: you set an "ad rate" between roughly 2% and 10%, and that percentage is added to your fee, but only on items where eBay can attribute the sale to the ad. Advanced is pay-per-click, where you're billed every time someone clicks the ad whether they buy or not.
Standard is what most casual sellers should default to. Advanced is built for sellers who actually track conversion data and can tell whether a click is profitable or not — if you can't tell that, you'll mostly just spend money for nothing.
The error I see people make most often is promoting items that were going to sell anyway. If your listing is priced competitively and the item's in demand, you don't need to pay extra to be visible — eBay's organic search will find buyers for you. The places where promoted listings actually earn back their cost are the slow movers, the items that have been sitting in your store for weeks with no traffic. Use the ad spend as a tool for inventory that's stuck, not as a default for everything you list.
The Top Rated Plus discount
Sellers who hit certain volume thresholds and maintain clean metrics qualify for Top Rated Seller status, and listings that meet some additional requirements (specifically one-day handling time and 30-day free returns) qualify for the Top Rated Plus discount on top of that. The discount is 10% off the final value fee on those specific listings.
Worth being specific about what that 10% means, because people misread it. It's 10% off the fee, not 10% off the sale. So if your final value fee on a transaction was $10, you save $1. Underwhelming on any single sale, definitely. It does add up if you're moving real volume.
The catch is the operational discipline the discount demands. One-day handling means actually shipping the item within one business day every time, with no slippage, and 30-day free returns means eating the return shipping cost on returns within that window. Both are real costs to the seller. For someone selling occasionally I wouldn't bother — the savings don't justify the discipline. For a regular seller, it's the kind of thing where the discount is mostly an excuse to enforce habits you should have anyway.
The 1099-K thing
Once your gross sales on eBay hit $600 in a calendar year, eBay sends you a 1099-K and sends the same data to the IRS. The number on that form is gross — it includes shipping, sales tax, the fees you paid, and the original cost of whatever you sold. It is not your profit. It looks alarming the first time you see it because it's much bigger than what actually landed in your bank account.
You're only taxed on profit, which means you have to actually subtract your costs to get there. That means tracking the original price you paid for items, shipping, eBay fees, supplies, and anything else tied to the sales. A jacket you bought thrifting for $10 and sold for $50 is $40 in revenue, minus fees and shipping, minus the $10 cost basis, and you need to be able to substantiate the cost basis if the IRS asks, which means hanging onto receipts that most people throw away within an hour of buying the item.
A couple of caveats. The $600 threshold has been moved around by Congress and the IRS more than once recently, so check the current rule for the tax year you're filing — don't trust a guide written three years ago. And if you're selling personal items at a loss (your old phone for less than you originally paid for it), that's not taxable income, but the 1099-K will report the gross anyway and the burden's on you to document the loss. "The 1099-K is wrong" is not a defense the IRS particularly cares about.
eBay vs. Amazon for the casual seller
Amazon's standard referral fee is 15%, slightly higher than eBay's 13.25%. The bigger difference for someone moving a few items a year is Amazon's per-item charge: if you don't pay $39.99 a month for the Professional plan, you owe $0.99 on every single item you sell.
On a $20 book, eBay charges you $2.65 plus the $0.30 flat fee, leaving you with $17.05. Amazon charges $3 plus the $0.99 per-item, leaving you $16.01. About a dollar's difference per sale, but a dollar matters on a $20 book.
For high-volume sellers the math flips, because the $39.99 monthly Professional plan is cheaper than the per-item fee somewhere around 40 items a month. There are also things you can do on Amazon you can't really do on eBay (FBA, brand registry) and things you can do on eBay you can't on Amazon (sell most used goods, list one-of-a-kind items without a UPC). They're not really substitutes for each other once you're doing this seriously. For someone clearing out a house, eBay almost always nets more.
What to actually run before you list
Don't bother for anything under $20 — the time spent calculating is worth more than the profit you're protecting. For anything above that, run the numbers before you set the price.
The pieces are: your sale price, the shipping you'll charge the buyer, your category's percentage, the $0.30 flat, any ad rate you've set, and your actual postage and packaging cost. Add up the costs, subtract from the sale price, that's what you keep.
The first time you do this, the answer is usually that you've been pricing things a bit low. I've definitely listed things and only realized halfway through the sale that the math was tighter than I'd assumed. The calculator's most useful function isn't predicting any single payout — it's recalibrating your gut feel for what's actually worth listing.