The short answer, channel by channel
Roughly 10–15% of what the buyer pays goes to the platform before you have covered shipping or the product itself. That is the planning number if the sale runs through a marketplace’s own checkout, and the spread inside it comes from three variables: which marketplace, which category, and whether you are paying for a store subscription. Every figure below came off the operator’s own fee page or policy document as of 2026 — not a fee-calculator site, not a Reddit thread, not a guide with an affiliate link under the table.
- Facebook Marketplace (Meta checkout, individual sellers): Meta’s Facebook Marketplace Seller Protection Policy states a selling fee of 10% per transaction with a minimum fee of $0.80. It is calculated on the entire transaction amount — item price, any shipping fees, and applicable taxes.
- eBay US (most categories, no store subscription): a 13.6% final value fee plus a per-order fee of $0.30 on orders of $10.00 or less and $0.40 on orders over $10.00. Category rates span roughly 2.5% to 15.3%, so “13.6%” is a starting assumption, not a universal one.
- Amazon US: $39.99 per month for the Professional plan or $0.99 per item sold on the Individual plan. Referral fees run 5% to 45% depending on category, with most categories between 8% and 15%, a $0.30 minimum referral fee in most categories, and a $1.80 per-item closing fee on media.
- Etsy: $0.20 per listing, a 6.5% transaction fee on the sale price including the shipping price you set, plus US payment processing of 3% + $0.25 through Etsy Payments. Processing rates differ by country.
- Walmart Marketplace: no setup, monthly, or subscription fee. Referral fees are category-based, most falling between 8% and 15%, with outliers as low as 3% (the portion of a watch sale above $1,500) and as high as 20% (jewelry up to $250).
Five platforms, five different answers, and none of them is the number you will actually see on your statement. That gap is the rest of this article.
Who pays the headline rate and who does not
The published percentage is the default, not your rate. Three things move it.
Store subscriptions. On eBay, subscribers get reduced category rates — antiques, for example, drop from 13.6% to 12.7% on a Basic Store. Nine tenths of a percentage point sounds like nothing until you turn it into money: it is $9 back on every $1,000 you sell in that category. Divide the store’s monthly price by 0.009 and you have the monthly antiques gross where the subscription starts paying for itself. Below that line you are buying a badge, not a discount.
Category. Media on eBay sits at the high end of the range while some hardline categories sit far below it. On Amazon, a 15% referral fee in one category and 8% in another is a difference big enough to decide what you source — seven points is often the whole margin on a $20 item. The rate you memorized for your old category has no bearing on the new one, and sellers who expand sideways learn this from a settlement report rather than a fee page.
Whether the platform touches the money at all. A Facebook Marketplace sale arranged locally and paid in cash never runs through Meta checkout, so there is no processed transaction for Meta to take a cut of. The 10% applies to shipped checkout orders. This is why the same couch can cost you nothing or cost you $32 depending purely on how the buyer hands you the money.
The break-even math worth doing once
Amazon’s two plans cross over at 41 units: $39.99 monthly divided by the $0.99 per-item Individual fee is about 40.4. Under roughly 40 sales a month, the Individual plan is cheaper on that line item alone. The phrase doing a lot of work there is on that line item alone — Individual sellers are also shut out of the featured offer and of Sponsored Products, so a Professional subscription can pay for itself through volume you would never have won on the cheaper plan. Do the arithmetic with your own unit count first, then decide whether the access is worth the difference. Defaulting to Professional because it sounds like the serious option is how a hobby seller pays $480 a year to list nine things.
The fee base is where money quietly leaks
The single most common costing error I see is pricing against the item price when the platform charges against the buyer’s total. eBay applies the final value fee to the total amount of the sale, which includes handling charges, shipping collected from the buyer, and sales tax. Meta calculates its selling fee on the entire transaction including shipping and taxes. Etsy’s 6.5% includes the shipping price you set.
Run it: a $40 item on eBay with $8 shipping is a $48 base. At 13.6% that is $6.53, plus a $0.40 per-order fee, for $6.93. Against the $40 item price, that is 17.3% — not 13.6%. If your margin model assumed the headline rate, you just lost close to four points, and sales tax on the order pushes the fee slightly higher still. Free-shipping listings make the gap wider, because the shipping you absorbed is still inside the fee base.
Minimum fees do the same damage at the cheap end, and they are easier to miss because they are footnotes rather than percentages. A $5 item sold through Meta checkout computes to $0.50 at 10%, but the $0.80 minimum applies, so the real rate is 16%. A $3 item in an 8% Amazon category computes to $0.24 and pays the $0.30 minimum referral fee — 10%. Etsy stacks its charges rather than replacing them: a $12 item with $5 shipping owes $1.11 in transaction fee on the $17, $0.76 in processing, and $0.20 for the listing, which is $2.07 against a $12 item, or 17.3% of the price on the tag. Under about $10, the fee floors decide whether the listing is worth writing at all.
The second failure mode is stale numbers. Marketplace fee structures change, and older figures — a 5% shipping fee and a $0.40 flat fee on small orders — are still circulating in third-party guides. If you reprice a catalog off a number you read in a blog post, you will discover the error in your settlement report, not your spreadsheet, and by then it is priced into every open listing you have. Open the platform’s own fee page, screenshot it, and write the date on the file. It takes two minutes and it is the only version of the rate you can prove you were working from.
How long the money actually takes to reach you
Fees decide margin; payout timing decides whether you can restock. As of 2026:
- eBay: sales proceeds typically appear as Available 1–2 days after the buyer’s payment is confirmed. On daily payouts, eBay initiates within 2 days excluding bank holidays; weekly payouts are initiated Tuesday for the prior Monday–Sunday; then it takes another 1–3 business days for funds to clear your bank.
- Amazon: accounts settle every 14 days, and the default reserve is 7 days past delivery — an item delivered January 6 becomes disbursable January 14. After the disbursement is initiated, funds can take up to five business days to land. Realistically, plan two to three weeks from sale to usable cash on a new account.
- Meta and Etsy: both publish payout timing inside their own help centers, and Meta’s shipping-payout pages are region-gated. The page a US seller loads is not always the page a UK seller loads at the same URL, which is exactly how a comparison site ends up quoting a schedule that does not apply to you. Read the version your own account sees.
Stack those against a bank holiday weekend and an Amazon sale made on the 3rd can be spendable somewhere around the 20th. Sellers who fund inventory out of last week’s revenue are the ones who get caught by this, usually in Q4, usually on the week they most needed the stock.
Why sellers get held up, and what to do first
Holds are usually mechanical, not personal. New accounts carry longer reserves. Missing a handling deadline or letting an order auto-cancel damages the metrics that release your money faster, and those metrics are trailing — one bad week keeps costing you after the week is over. Refunds and returns are worth an hour of your attention too, because the fee reversal is rarely total and the rules are not the same on any two platforms. Do not take my word for the shape of it: pull one refunded order in your transaction report, find the credit lines, and see which charges actually came back and which the platform kept. Then repeat that once per channel instead of assuming symmetry.
One structural surprise worth knowing before it hits: Etsy shops that have made $10,000 or more in any consecutive 365-day period are required to participate in Offsite Ads for the shop’s lifetime, at a discounted 12% fee versus 15% for smaller shops, capped at $100 per attributed order. Note the wording — lifetime, and any rolling 365-day window, so a single strong holiday season can enroll you permanently. Crossing a revenue threshold changes your cost structure automatically, and the change arrives without a decision from you. Model it before you cross it, not after.
A checklist you can run today
- Open each channel’s official fee page, screenshot it, and date the file.
- Rebuild your margin sheet so the fee is calculated on item + shipping + tax, not item price alone.
- Look up the referral or final value rate for every category you actually list in, not just your biggest one.
- Flag every SKU under $10 and check it against the minimum fee, not the percentage — that is where listings quietly sell at a loss.
- Divide your monthly unit volume against any subscription fee to confirm the plan you are on is the cheaper one.
- Pull last month’s settlement report and compare actual fees taken to what your sheet predicted; investigate any gap over one percentage point.
- Note your current payout schedule and reserve policy per channel, and set restock timing to the slowest one.
- If you are near $10,000 in trailing-365-day Etsy revenue, add the 12% Offsite Ads fee to your forward model now.
- Diary a quarterly recheck — fee schedules move, and your pricing should move with them.
None of this makes the fees smaller. It makes them predictable, which is the part you can actually operate against.