Marketplace Fee Comparison 2026 — What Every Selling Channel Actually Takes

How to read this comparison

Every table that tries to rank selling platforms runs into the same wall: they do not charge the same kind of money. Etsy takes a percentage of each sale and nothing else. Shopify takes a much smaller percentage but bills a subscription whether you sell anything or not. Poshmark takes a fifth of the sale but hands the buyer a prepaid label, so postage never touches your side of the ledger at all. Those are not three versions of one number, and lining up their headline rates produces a ranking that is wrong for most sellers.

The only common unit is money kept per month at a stated volume, which is what this page computes:

Fix a price and a volume and every channel collapses to one figure you can rank. Change the volume and the ranking changes — which is the honest answer to "which platform is cheapest", and the reason this is a calculator rather than a table.

A worked example with real numbers

What each channel actually charges its fee on

This is the table that resolves most of the disagreement between fee comparisons written elsewhere. It is not typed. Each row is produced by running that channel's own calculator at $100 with no postage, then again with $10 of postage, then again with $10 of sales tax, and reporting the difference — so a platform that changes what it charges on changes this table on the next build with no edit anywhere.

Reading the sales tax column. "Not modelled" is not the same as "nothing". eBay and Etsy are the two channels whose rate data records how they treat the tax they collect on your behalf, so those are the only two this site is willing to put a number against. eBay charges its full final value fee on sales tax it collects and remits — money that was never yours — which is why $10 of tax costs $1.36 there. Facebook Marketplace's own fee page says tax is part of its fee base too, but this site has no structured figure for it, so it is shown as unmodelled rather than as zero. Where a cell says nothing, it is because the channel's fee ran identically with and without the tax.

Reading the fixed-fee column. A channel has a fixed component when doubling the price does not double the fee. That is what makes a cheap sale disproportionately expensive: a $0.45 floor is nothing on a $200 item and is 4.5% of a $10 one. It is also why the ranking at $15 is not the ranking at $500 — try the presets above.

Prices where charging more leaves you with less

A tiered fee is harmless. Crossing a tier boundary changes the rate on the next dollar, and you still keep more by charging more. A cliff is different: crossing it re-rates the whole sale, so there is a band of prices just above it where raising your asking price leaves you strictly worse off. Platforms publish the rate change. None of them publish the band.

These are found by scanning each channel's fee a cent at a time and flagging every point where one more cent of asking price costs more than one cent of fee:

The dead band is the actionable number. Anything priced inside it nets you less than the same item priced one cent below the cliff, so there is never a reason to list there. Note what is not in this table: minimum fees. Facebook's $0.80 floor and StockX's $5.00 floor make cheap items expensive, but they never make charging more leave you with less, so they are not cliffs.

Subscriptions, and the volume that justifies them

At the current settings, 2 channels bill a subscription: Shopify at $29.00 a month, Amazon (Professional) at $39.99 a month. A subscription is the one cost on this page that does not scale with what you sell, which cuts both ways. Spread across 30 orders it is $0.97 an order on Shopify and $1.33 an order on Amazon (Professional) — but in a month where you sell nothing it is the whole bill.

That is why the volume field above matters more than any of the rate fields. Drop the order count to a handful and every subscription channel falls to the bottom of the ranking; raise it and they climb past platforms charging four times the percentage. There is a single crossing point in each case, and it is solvable rather than a matter of judgement — the Etsy vs Shopify page solves the one people ask about most.

What this does not account for

• Sell-through. The highest-paying channel is not always the fastest-selling one, and an item that sits unsold for six months earns nothing at any fee rate. This is the single largest omission and no fee calculator can fix it.
• What the buyer sees. Several of the zero-seller-fee platforms charge the buyer instead — a protection fee on top of your asking price. Your payout is higher and the buyer's total is higher too, which competes against the same item listed elsewhere.
• Promoted listings and ads. Most of these channels sell visibility on top of the fees modelled here, and Etsy's Offsite Ads fires on ad-attributed orders whether or not you opted in above $10,000 of trailing sales.
• Amazon fulfilment. Referral fee only, as explained above.
• Returns, disputes and chargebacks. The policies differ sharply and the costs land unevenly.
• Income tax. These are payout figures. If this is a business rather than clearing out a cupboard, see the self-employment tax calculator.

Who this is for

Anyone deciding where to sell rather than what to charge — someone choosing a first channel, someone whose volume has grown enough to wonder whether a storefront is now cheaper, or someone who has been on one platform long enough to stop noticing what it costs. It is most useful before the decision. Once you have built an audience on a channel, the fee difference this page measures is only one side of the ledger, and usually the smaller one.