"Should I sell on Etsy or eBay?" comes up a lot for makers and resellers — and fees are usually the first thing people weigh. The two marketplaces charge in very different ways: Etsy stacks several small fees, while eBay leans on one big final value fee. But a single headline percentage doesn't tell you which is cheaper for your sale. Here are the real 2026 numbers, side by side, so you can see which marketplace keeps more of your money.
How Etsy charges in 2026
Etsy's model is a handful of small fees that add up. On each sale you pay:
- Listing fee — $0.20 per item, renewed every time it sells.
- Transaction fee — 6.5% of the total order (item + shipping + gift wrap).
- Payment processing — a percentage plus a fixed fee, based on your bank's country: 3% + $0.25 in the US, 4% + £0.20 in the UK, 4% + €0.30 across much of the EU.
- Sometimes: Offsite Ads (12–15% when a sale is attributed), a regulatory operating fee in some countries, currency conversion (2.5%), and — for UK/EU/Türkiye sellers — VAT charged on the fees themselves.
For a typical US seller the baseline bite is roughly 11% of the order before Offsite Ads. Abroad, once the higher processing rate and VAT-on-fees stack, a small order can lose a lot more.
How eBay charges in 2026
eBay's model is the reverse — one large fee that folds in payment processing:
- Final value fee — 13.6% of the total sale for most categories, plus a per-order fee of $0.40 (or $0.30 on orders of $10 or less), on amounts up to $7,500. Payment processing is already baked into this number.
- Insertion (listing) fee — your first 250 listings a month are free; after that it's $0.35 per listing. Most small sellers never hit the cap.
- Category matters: the final value fee ranges from about 2.5% to 15.3% depending on what you sell — 13.6% is the common rate, not a universal one.
- An optional eBay Store subscription ($27.95/month for Basic) lowers the final value fee (to around 12.7% in many categories) and adds free listings — worth it only at higher volume.
One catch worth knowing: eBay calculates its final value fee on the entire order total, including sales tax collected from the buyer. Etsy's transaction fee is charged on item + shipping + gift wrap, and Etsy remits buyer sales tax/VAT separately.
The head-to-head: same order, both platforms
Take a $25 item with $5 shipping — a $30 order — for a US seller, standard categories.
Etsy: $0.20 listing + 6.5% of $30 ($1.95) + 3% of $30 + $0.25 processing ($1.15) ≈ $3.30, about 11%.
eBay: 13.6% of $30 ($4.08) + $0.40 = $4.48, about 15%.
On this everyday order Etsy is cheaper, because its combined cut usually lands below eBay's all-in 13.6% + $0.40. The math flips only in specific cases: if an Etsy sale gets hit with 15% Offsite Ads on top of everything, that single order can cost more on Etsy than on eBay — and eBay's free listings can win for sellers who list huge inventories that mostly don't sell.
Where each one wins on fees
Etsy tends to be cheaper per sale for the everyday, unattributed order, since its baseline ~11% beats eBay's ~15% all-in. eBay is cheaper to list on — 250 free listings a month versus Etsy's $0.20 every time — which matters if you carry a large catalog with a low sell-through rate. And eBay's single fee is predictable: no country-based processing surprises and no VAT-on-fees, though its rate does swing by category.
But fees aren't the real question — the audience is
Here's the honest part most fee comparisons skip: the marketplace fee is really the cost of the buyers it brings you, and Etsy and eBay attract different shoppers. Etsy is a dedicated handmade, vintage and craft-supply destination — its buyers arrive expecting handmade and often pay more for it. eBay is a vast general marketplace built around resale, deals and hard-to-find goods, where handmade items compete against everything else and buyers hunt for the lowest price. A few percentage points of fee matter far less than which platform actually puts your product in front of people who want to buy exactly what you make.
The number that actually decides it
Whichever marketplace you choose, the fee percentage isn't your real question — your profit per product is. An 11% Etsy cut is fine on a 40%-margin product and fatal on an 8%-margin one; the same is true of eBay's 15%. You can pressure-test a single Etsy product with our free Etsy fee calculator: enter your price, country and costs and see exactly what's left after every fee.
And to see it across your whole Etsy shop — with the fees Etsy actually charged rather than an estimate — that's what Seller Profit Lens does. It connects to your Etsy shop read-only, reads the real per-product fees to the cent, subtracts your costs, and reconciles to Etsy's own totals so you know which products truly make money — the fact you need before deciding whether a move to another marketplace is even worth it. It's in free beta now. Join the waitlist →