Returns and refunds: what one return really costs
A return is not just a reversed sale. The platform keeps some of its fees, the postage you already paid never comes back, and the item may not resell. This prices one return on the shelf it happened on, and then tells you how many sales it takes to pay for it.
The refund rules are read from each platform's own pages, not from memory: Etsy Help on refunds and cancellations, eBay's fee credits policy, and Amazon's fee schedule (refund administration fee = the lesser of US$5.00 or 20% of the referral fee). All read November 2026. Where a platform's page does not say whether a fee comes back, this tool does not guess — see the notes under the table.
The same return on four shelves
Your numbers, run through each shelf as a buyer's-remorse return with a full refund through the platform's own flow.
| Shelf | Fees kept | Costs you absorb | Cost of the return | Normal profit per order |
|---|
"Fees kept" is what the platform does not give back, taken from its own published refund rules. "Costs you absorb" is outbound postage, return postage and any value lost — none of which the platform refunds. Deliberately excluded, because the source pages do not state it: whether an FBA fulfilment fee returns on a refunded FBA order, Etsy's Regulatory Operating fee and Offsite Ads fee on a refunded order, and eBay's Promoted Listings priority fee (which its page says is not refunded but is not quantified here). One estimate is labelled as such: for Amazon, the fee schedule describes the refund administration fee only for a refund the seller issues, so the "platform stepped in" case is shown at the full referral fee because no other Amazon rule is published — treat that one row as an estimate.
A 6% return rate is invisible in a sales report and obvious in a margin one. Upload your orders export and see which products carry it. Run one export free, no signup.
Pricing the listing in the first place? The target-margin pricer solves the price, and the discount calculator prices a sale.
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Etsy, Amazon, Walmart and TikTok change their fee tables without announcing it, and the Canadian tax deadlines move. I check and send one short email when something real changes. No sequence, no selling you something every Tuesday.
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