Marketplace seller fees compared, layer by layer

You sold a £42 item, the marketplace said its commission was around a tenth, and the money that landed was £29. Nobody lied to you. You just got charged in five places and only read about one of them.

The short version: the headline commission is the smallest and most honest of the fees, and it's the only one anybody quotes. Underneath it sit a listing fee, payment processing, an advertising cut that starts optional and stops being optional, and fulfilment charges if you use theirs. Then there's the question of what the percentage is charged on, which quietly moves your real rate by two or three points. Amazon, to use a platform whose numbers I could actually read on 6 August 2026, charges $39.99 a month on the Professional plan or $0.99 per item sold on Individual, and then a category referral fee on top that ranges from 5% to 45%, with most categories in the 8% to 15% band and a $0.30 minimum per item.

Your job is to get to one number: the all-in percentage of a typical order that doesn't reach you. It's almost never the number on the fees page.

The five layers, and what each is charged on

Layer one: listing

A per-item charge to have the thing visible at all, sometimes with an expiry that makes it recurring. Small in isolation. Sharp if you list many items that don't sell, because you pay it whether or not anyone buys.

The tell that this layer matters to you: how many items do you list for every one you sell? A seller who lists 200 second-hand pieces to sell 30 is paying listing fees on 170 failures a month.

Layer two: commission

Called referral fee, final value fee, transaction fee or commission depending on the platform. This is the layer everybody compares, and it's the layer that varies least.

The important part isn't the percentage. It's the base. Ask three questions:

• Is it charged on the item price, or the item price plus delivery?
• Is it charged before or after any discount you ran?
• Does it include tax collected from the buyer?

A 10% fee on the item alone and a 10% fee on the item plus postage plus tax are meaningfully different rates. On a ₱850 phone case with ₱120 delivery, the difference is ₱12 per order, which is ₱3,600 a year at 25 orders a month. That's not nothing and it's never on the comparison chart.

Layer three: payment processing

Sometimes bundled into the commission, sometimes charged separately, and the separate ones are easy to miss because they're a percentage plus a fixed amount.

The fixed amount is what hurts cheap products. PayPal's US commercial rate on 6 August 2026 was 3.49% + $0.49, with an extra 1.5% cross-border and a 4% currency conversion spread. On a $6 item, that $0.49 alone is over 8%. On a $60 item it's under 1%. Any fee with a fixed component is a tax on small baskets, which is the whole argument in how payment fees eat a small order.

Layer four: advertising

This starts as a choice and ends as a cost of doing business.

Once enough sellers in your category pay for placement, organic ranking is worth less, and the sellers who don't advertise slide down the page. Some platforms also run an offsite advertising programme that charges a percentage when a sale is attributed to an ad they bought, and on some of those programmes participation is mandatory above a revenue threshold.

Treat advertising as a fee layer, not a marketing budget, and add it to your all-in rate. If you spent £180 on placement last month and sold £2,000, that's 9% and it belongs in the same column as the commission.

Layer five: fulfilment and returns

Storage, pick and pack, per-unit fulfilment, long-term storage surcharges on stock that hasn't moved, return processing, and the cost of the item that comes back unsellable.

If you use the platform's warehouse, this layer is often larger than the commission. If you ship yourself, it's mostly the returns, and the returns policy is theirs rather than yours.

What I could verify on 6 August 2026, and what I couldn't

Every figure below came from the company's own page on 6 August 2026. I've dated them because marketplace fees change more than once a year and an undated fee quote is worse than no quote.

Platform	Verified charge	Page
Amazon	$39.99/mo Professional or $0.99 per item sold Individual, plus category referral fees from 5% to 45%, most categories 8% to 15%, $0.30 minimum in most categories	sell.amazon.com/pricing
Gumroad	30% on sales where the Gumroad marketplace found the buyer, 10% + $0.50 on sales through your own link, no monthly fee	gumroad.com/pricing
Patreon	10% of what you earn, plus payment processing, currency conversion and payout fees	patreon.com/pricing
Payhip	5% on the $0 plan, 2% on the $29/mo plan, 0% on the $99/mo plan	payhip.com/pricing
PayPal	3.49% + $0.49 US commercial transactions, +1.5% cross-border, 4% conversion spread	paypal.com/us/business/paypal-business-fees

Now the honest part. I could not load Etsy's fee page, eBay's fee page, or the seller fee pages for Jumia, Meesho, Depop, Shopee or Lazada on 6 August 2026. They returned errors or timed out.

So I'm not quoting figures for any of them, and you should be suspicious of any comparison article that does without saying when it checked. Those are among the most-copied numbers on the internet and a lot of them are two fee changes out of date. Open the platform's own fee page, in your own country, today. It takes four minutes and it's the only version that's true for you.

That's also the useful bit of advice hiding in the failure: the structure of the fee is stable, the number isn't. Learn the five layers and you can price any marketplace in ten minutes without trusting anyone's chart.

Work out your own all-in rate in ten minutes

Take your last ten payouts. Not your last ten sales. Payouts.

For each one, write what the buyer paid and what landed in your account. Divide the difference by what the buyer paid. Average the ten. That number, expressed as a percentage, is your real rate, and it already includes every layer you forgot about.

Most sellers who do this for the first time find their all-in rate is between 4 and 12 points higher than the commission percentage they thought they were paying.

Then do it again with advertising included: add last month's ad spend to the total taken, divide by last month's sales.

Line	Example, a £42 order
Buyer paid, item	£42.00
Buyer paid, delivery	£3.95
Commission at an example 12% of item plus delivery	£5.51
Payment processing at an example 2.9% + £0.30	£1.63
Listing fees allocated, 6 listings per sale	£0.90
Advertising allocated, 8% of item price	£3.36
Postage you actually paid	£4.60
Left before cost of goods	£29.95

Those percentages are examples, not anyone's published rate. Substitute your own from your own payouts. The point of the table is the shape, and the shape is that four small layers did more damage than the headline fee.

Rina in Cebu, and the fee she didn't see coming

Rina sells phone cases and cables from Cebu. ₱850 for a case, ₱1,200 for a braided cable set, about 60 orders a month across a marketplace and her own Instagram. Around seven in ten of her marketplace orders are cash on delivery, which is normal in the Philippines and not a fallback.

Her marketplace commission looked manageable. What caught her was the combination of two things nobody flags.

First, the fee base included the shipping the buyer paid. Second, cash on delivery orders came back at a rate she hadn't budgeted for: parcels refused at the door, buyers not home twice, items returned to her at her cost, and the platform's fee already deducted on some of them before the return processed. Her actual take-home on marketplace orders was about 19% below the buyer's total once she averaged ten payouts, against a headline commission she'd assumed was roughly half that.

She didn't leave. She did two things instead. She raised her marketplace prices by ₱90 to cover the gap, which cost her nothing in volume because everyone else's prices moved the same way that quarter. And she started sending every Instagram order to her own link, where the buyer pays her directly by GCash or bank transfer, so no marketplace commission applies at all, because those were customers she'd found herself.

Her marketplace revenue is flat and her profit is up about a fifth. The fees didn't change. What changed is that she stopped paying commission on customers she'd already earned.

When the commission is worth every unit of currency you pay it

Say this plainly, because most articles about fees are secretly arguing that you should stop paying them.

A marketplace fee buys you a buyer. That's the entire product and it's genuinely enormous. If a stranger typed "waterproof phone case Cebu" and found Rina, that customer cost her a commission and nothing else. No content, no algorithm luck, no months of posting.

The commission is only expensive when you brought the customer yourself. A buyer who saw your reel, searched your shop name on the marketplace because their card was saved there, and bought, is an order you generated and then rented a checkout for. That is the expensive order, and most sellers have more of them than they think.

The way to find out is to ask. Add one question to your packing note: how did you find me? Two months of answers will tell you what fraction of your fees are buying you anything. The wider version of that argument is in when a marketplace beats your own shop.

What Sailo charges, and where it loses

Sailo isn't a marketplace and never sends you a buyer, which is the biggest single difference in this whole comparison. There's no search, no browse page, no recommendations. If you have no audience, the fee structure below is irrelevant, because the traffic is zero and a percentage of zero is zero.

The charges: nothing at all on bank transfer, cash on delivery, or orders handed off to WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, email or phone, because Sailo never holds that money. On card, 1–3% of the goods, after discounts, excluding delivery and tax, taken as a Stripe application fee, with the charge landing in your own Stripe account. Plans are $0 free with a 20-product cap, $19/mo Pro, $49/mo Business, and card requires Business plus a Stripe account cleared for charges.

The honest limitation for a marketplace seller reading this: card is Stripe only. There's no Paystack and no mobile money rail, so if your buyers pay by M-Pesa or GCash or UPI, Sailo handles the catalogue and the order and the money stays entirely between you and your buyer. You can put a till number in the bank transfer instructions and it works fine, but that's a workaround rather than a rail, and I'm not going to dress it up as one.

The other honest limitation: at very low volume a flat $49 is worse than any commission on this page. Ten card orders of $15 a month is $150 of sales, and a $49 subscription is 13% of it. A commission-based marketplace beats that comfortably.

A fee you pay for a customer you found yourself is the most expensive money in retail.

Do this before your next payout

Pull your last ten payouts and compute your all-in rate. Write the number on a piece of paper and stick it somewhere you'll see it, because you'll otherwise keep making decisions against the headline percentage.

Then open the fee page for every platform you sell on, today, in your own country, and note the date next to each rate. Set a reminder for six months to do it again.

If your all-in rate surprised you, the arithmetic on where a percentage stops beating a flat fee is worked out at 10, 50 and 300 orders a month in what a commission actually costs you. And if the answer is that you want more of your orders coming through a channel you control, the thing that makes that possible is owning your customer list. The four categories of tool that could hold that channel are compared in link in bio tools compared.