eBay vs Mercari Fees (2026) — What Each One Takes From the Same Sale

Where the 3.6-point gap actually comes from

Written as headline rates this looks like a small difference: eBay charges 13.6% in most categories, Mercari charges 10%. In practice the gap on a real sale is wider, and it is wider for three reasons that have nothing to do with that headline.

The base is different, the rate is different, and only one of them has a fixed fee attached. Each of those pushes the same direction.

1. eBay charges a fee on the sales tax it collects

eBay collects sales tax on your behalf and remits it to the state. The money is never yours — it passes through your order and out again — and eBay charges its full final value fee on it on the way past. That costs $1.36 for every $10 of tax on your orders. Enter a tax figure in the calculator above and watch it land on eBay's side alone.

Mercari's published fee base is the item price plus the postage you collect, with no tax term in it. This site does not model a sales tax component for Mercari at all, so the comparison holds it at zero on that side — which means the gap shown here is the optimistic one for eBay, not a worst case. An absence in our rate data is not the same as a documented zero, and this page does not treat it as one.

2. eBay has a per-order fee and Mercari does not

$0.30 on orders up to $10 and $0.40 above it, charged once per order regardless of size. On a $400 sale that is a rounding error. On an $8 sale it is 3.8% on its own, before the percentage fee is applied at all — which is why eBay's effective rate on cheap items is far above its advertised one, and why the two platforms diverge most at the bottom of the price range rather than the top.

3. Both charge on postage, but not by the same amount

Neither platform lets you escape the fee by splitting delivery out of the price: both charge their percentage on the postage you collect. But they charge different percentages of it. On $10 of postage, eBay takes $1.36 and Mercari takes $1.00.

The practical consequence is that "offer free shipping and build it into the price" changes nothing about your fee on either platform. It is the same base either way.

A worked example with real numbers

Does the answer ever flip?

No — and that is worth stating plainly rather than manufacturing a threshold to make the page feel balanced. This site searches the whole price range from $1 to $5,000 on every build looking for a crossing point between these two schedules, and there is not one. Mercari's fee is lower at every price.

The search is real rather than an assumption: if either platform changed its schedule so that a crossover appeared, this section would report the price instead of this paragraph. Until then, anyone telling you eBay becomes cheaper above some threshold is describing a fee structure neither platform currently has.

What does change with price is the size of the gap as a percentage. eBay's per-order fee makes cheap sales disproportionately expensive there, so the two are furthest apart on small items and converge — without ever meeting — as the sale price rises. Run the presets above from $10 to $400 and watch the effective rates close.

What the fee gap is buying

A comparison where one side wins everywhere is only useful if it says what the losing side is for. On fees alone the recommendation would be trivial, and it would also be wrong for a lot of sellers.

eBay is roughly an order of magnitude larger by buyer count, indexes categories Mercari does not meaningfully serve — vehicle parts, industrial equipment, collectables, anything identified by a part number — and reaches buyers outside the United States. Mercari is a domestic app aimed at everyday secondhand goods, and it is very good at those.

The arithmetic that matters is not $7.61 against $5.30. It is $37.39 in a week against $39.70 in three months, or never. A 5.8% difference in payout is small next to a difference in whether the item sells at all, and this calculator cannot measure sell-through — nobody's can, because it depends on your specific item.

The version of this that survives contact with reality: list ordinary consumer goods where they cost you least, list anything specialised where the buyers already are, and stop treating it as a single decision about a platform rather than a decision per item.

What this does not account for

• Buyer-side fees. Mercari charges buyers a Buyer Protection fee on top of your asking price and eBay does not. Your payout is unaffected, but the buyer's total is not, and the same item at the same price looks cheaper on eBay to the person deciding.
• Promoted listings. eBay's ad rates are seller-set and come straight off this payout. Mercari has its own promotion mechanics. Neither is included here.
• Sell-through. The largest omission, and the one that most often reverses the conclusion.
• Category exceptions. eBay's final value fee is not one rate — several categories are charged differently and a few are cliffs rather than marginal tiers. The eBay fee calculator carries the full table.
• Returns and disputes. Policies and costs differ, and neither is modelled.
• Income tax. These are payout figures. See the self-employment tax calculator if this is a business.

Who this is for

Resellers who list on one and wonder about the other, and anyone who has read that Mercari charges sellers nothing — which was true for ten months and has not been true since January 2025. If you are choosing between more than these two, the reseller fee calculator ranks nine platforms at once and the marketplace fee comparison adds the storefront options.