Marketplace fee comparison
Price one product across Amazon, eBay, Etsy, TikTok Shop, Walmart and your own Shopify store with identical inputs, and see which one actually pays you most.
Illustrative comparison only. Account eligibility, fee bases and fulfilment services differ between platforms. Some stored fees lack primary-source verification. This worksheet is excluded from search and advertising pending a complete rate review.
Shopify is $5.14 more than Walmart Marketplace — a 22% difference on the same sale.
| Marketplace | Fees | Fee % | Net profit | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify | $1.61 | 3.6% | $22.89 | 50.9% |
| TikTok Shop | $2.70 | 6% | $21.80 | 48.4% |
| Etsy | $4.73 | 10.5% | $19.77 | 43.9% |
| eBay | $6.52 | 14.5% | $17.98 | 40% |
| Amazon | $6.75 | 15% | $17.75 | 39.4% |
| Walmart Marketplace | $6.75 | 15% | $17.75 | 39.4% |
Shopify shows no commission because there is not one — but on your own store you pay for every visitor. A marketplace fee is really a customer-acquisition cost with a fixed price, and the comparison only becomes fair once you put your true cost per acquired sale into the advertising field.
Same product, same inputs, six answers
Comparing marketplaces on their headline referral rate is close to useless, because the rates are applied to different bases and sit alongside different fixed fees. eBay charges on the item plus postage plus tax. Etsy charges on the item plus postage. Amazon charges on item plus postage and gift wrap. Add per-order fees, listing fees, payment processing that is sometimes bundled and sometimes not, and VAT charged on the fees themselves in some markets, and two platforms whose headline rates differ by a point can differ by several points of actual margin.
This page prices one product across all of them with identical inputs, so the difference you see is the fee structure rather than an artefact of how each was entered.
The Shopify number is the one to read carefully
Your own store takes no commission, so it wins every fee comparison by a wide margin and that result is misleading on its own. On a marketplace the referral fee buys you traffic. On your own store you buy that traffic yourself, and the relevant comparison is not fee against zero but fee against customer acquisition cost. A 15% referral fee on a $30 product is $4.50; a Shopify store only genuinely wins once you can acquire that customer for less than $4.50, which is a demanding bar in most consumer categories.
The honest way to use this comparison is to treat the marketplace fee as the price of demand and then ask what that demand would cost you to buy. The break-even ACOS calculator does the second half of that from the same fee stack.
Questions people ask about this
Answers written from the published rules, not from other people's summaries of them. Every figure quoted below is listed with its source at the foot of this page.
Every formula on this siteWhich marketplace has the lowest fees?
On headline percentage, Shopify — it takes no commission at all. But that comparison is a trap: on a marketplace the fee buys you traffic, and on your own store you buy that traffic yourself. A Shopify store only wins once you can acquire a customer for less than the marketplace's referral fee, which for a 15% fee on a $30 product means under $4.50.
Why do the fees differ so much on the same product?
Different fee bases as much as different rates. eBay charges on the item plus postage plus tax, Etsy on the item plus postage, Amazon on item plus postage and gift wrap. Add per-order fees, listing fees and VAT on fees and two marketplaces with similar headline rates can differ by several points of margin.
Should I list the same product on several marketplaces at once?
Usually yes, but not at the same price. Each platform has a different fee base and different fixed charges, so a single price produces different margins on each, and on low-value items one channel can be loss-making while another is fine. Price per channel to a target margin rather than to a single number. The inventory risk of overselling across channels is a separate problem and needs a stock sync, not a pricing decision.
Do these comparisons include fulfilment costs?
Fulfilment is modelled where the platform charges for it and left to you where it does not, because that is the honest split. Amazon FBA fees are a published rate card and are included. On eBay, Etsy and your own store you fulfil the order yourself, so the cost is your pick, pack and postage, which only you know. Entering the same fulfilment cost across the self-fulfilled channels is the fair comparison; entering zero flatters them against FBA.
Which marketplace should a new seller start on?
The one where the demand for your specific product already exists, which is rarely the one with the lowest fees. Fee differences between the major marketplaces are typically a few points of margin. Differences in traffic for a given category are frequently an order of magnitude. Start where the buyers are, get the unit economics working at that fee level, and treat lower-fee channels as an expansion once you have demand you can direct.
Further reading
Related calculators
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Where these numbers come from
Rates and rules change, and a calculator running on stale data is worse than no calculator. Every figure below carries the date we last checked it and a confidence level, so you can judge how much weight to put on it.
| Source | Publisher | Effective | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Selling on Amazon fee schedule Public page. Confirms referral fees of 5% to 45% by category, a $0.30 per-item minimum, the $1.80 media closing fee, and the $0.99 Individual versus $39.99 Professional plans. It does not publish the FBA size-tier rate card, which sits behind the Seller Central login. | Amazon | Not specifiedChecked 2026-08-17 | Primary source |
| eBay seller fees 2026 Standard final value fee 13.6% in most categories, plus a per-order fee of $0.30 on orders up to $10 and $0.40 above. The final value fee already includes payment processing under managed payments — adding a separate processing percentage double-counts, which at least one popular calculator appears to do. | Taxomate | 2026Checked 2026-08-17 | Corroborated |
| Etsy fee structure and regulatory operating fees Supports 6.5% transaction fee excluding US sales tax, USD 0.20 listing fee and eligible Offsite Ads terms. Not a source for all countries’ payment processing rates. | Craftybase | 2026-03Checked 2026-09-21 | Primary source |
| TikTok Shop seller fees 2026 Reports a US referral fee of 6% covering both commission and payment processing, and 9% in the UK. This conflicts with a widely repeated 8% figure for the US. TikTok has stepped its US commission more than once, so the calculator defaults to 6% but makes the rate editable and shows both figures. | Dashboardly | 2026Checked 2026-08-17 | Secondary source |
| Walmart Marketplace seller fees Referral fees of 6% to 15% by category with no monthly subscription. | Aura | Not specifiedChecked 2026-08-17 | Secondary source |
| Update to US referral and Fulfilment by Amazon fees for 2026 Published by Amazon itself. Referral fees unchanged for 2026 — frozen since January 2024. Fulfilment fees up about $0.08 per unit on average from 15 January 2026. | Amazon | 2026-01-15Checked 2026-08-18 | Primary source |
| eBay selling fees — final value fee and the $7,500 break US non-Store schedule. Most categories: 13.6% through USD 7500 then 2.35% marginally; specified media 15.3%; guitars 6.7%. Per-order fee USD 0.30 through USD 10 and USD 0.40 above. Store, special-category and seller-performance terms differ. | eBay | Not specifiedChecked 2026-09-21 | Primary source |
Page updated . Spotted something out of date? Tell us — corrections are published with the date they were made.
More on the working: every formula on this site, the full source register, what the terms mean, and how we decide what to publish. What an estimate here can and cannot support is set out in the accuracy notes.