What each marketplace actually leaves you on a $45 order

Every fee article quotes a percentage. The percentage is rarely what costs you. This is one product — a $45 item, $7 shipping the buyer pays, $14 landed cost, a $9 label — run through four marketplaces with the arithmetic shown, using rates checked 6 November 2026.

Take a single order. The buyer pays $52.00 ($45.00 for the item, $7.00 for shipping). Your cost of goods is $14.00 and the shipping label you buy is $9.00, so $23.00 is gone no matter which shelf the order came from. What is left of the other $29.00 is decided by the fees:

The same product, the same price, the same cost of goods — and a spread of $6.76 per order between the best shelf and the worst. That gap is larger than most sellers' entire ad budget per order, and it comes from three fee bases behaving differently, not from the headline rates.

The arithmetic, shelf by shelf

Etsy — $5.39

Etsy charges a $0.20 listing fee, then 6.5% on the item price and what the buyer paid for shipping, plus payment processing of 3% + $0.25 on the same total:
0.20 + 52.00 × 6.5% + 52.00 × 3% + 0.25 = $5.39.

What most sellers miss is the second and third terms: shipping is inside the base twice. A "free shipping included" price is a fee-bearing price.

If you are Canadian, Etsy adds a further 0.5% Regulatory Operating Fee on the order — 52.00 × 0.5% = $0.26 — which is why the Canadian column above keeps $0.26 less. If the buyer is outside North America, payment processing rises from 3% to 4%, adding another $0.52.

eBay — $7.37

eBay applies its final value fee to the total the buyer pays, shipping included, then a fixed amount per order:
52.00 × 13.6% + $0.30 = $7.37.

The fixed $0.30 is a rounding error here and a real loss on a $9 item. That is the whole reason cheap listings quietly return nothing — the fee that does not scale with price.

TikTok Shop US — $7.62

TikTok's 6% is charged on the buyer payment plus any platform-funded discount, minus tax, and then your creator commission is taken on the item price before fulfilment:
52.00 × 6% + 45.00 × 10% = $7.62.

Two things worth stating plainly: a discount TikTok funds does not lower your fee — it is added back before the percentage is applied — and the creator commission you set usually costs more than the platform fee itself. On this order the commission is $4.50 against a $3.12 platform fee.

Amazon (FBA) — $12.15

Amazon takes a referral fee on the total sales price, then a fulfilment fee that does not shrink when the price does:
45.00 × 15% + $5.40 = $12.15.

The FBA fee is 10% of the item price on this order. On a cheaper item it is proportionally worse, which is why the same 15% referral fee produces very different margins across a catalogue.

The three rules the numbers give you

• Read the base, not the rate. A 6% fee on a base that includes shipping, discounts and tax can cost more than a 15% fee on the item price. Where the percentage is applied matters more than the percentage.
• Never leave shipping out of the fee base. It is in the base on Etsy, eBay and TikTok Shop. Pricing "free shipping" without loading the fee into the price is a quiet margin cut.
• A shelf's fixed costs decide small items. eBay's $0.30 and Amazon's FBA fee do not scale down. Run your cheapest three products through this before your bestsellers — that is where the losses hide.

Work it on your own product instead of this one: the four-marketplace comparison takes one product and shows all four payouts side by side. Just need one shelf? Etsy, eBay, Amazon and TikTok Shop each have their own calculator.