"Cheapest" only means something once every marketplace has been forced to answer for the same sale, at the same price, with no fee left out because it was inconvenient.
A comparison that quotes Etsy’s transaction fee but skips its listing fee, or quotes eBay’s insertion-fee-free tier but ignores the final value fee once something sells, is not a comparison. It is a sales pitch for whichever one left more out. The only honest version runs one price through every charge each marketplace actually makes.
That rule cuts both ways: it also means not quoting our 3% without mentioning the card’s own processing cost that sits underneath it, or implying that cost is zero just because it is not rounded into one number on this page.
A fair comparison also states which fees are recurring and which are per-sale, since the two behave completely differently as a catalogue grows or shrinks over time.
On Etsy: a $0.20 listing fee (renewed every four months, so $0.60 a year if unsold), plus on the sale itself, 6.5% ($0.325) and 3% plus $0.25 processing ($0.40) — $0.725 off the top of a $5 sale. On eBay: no listing fee within the first 250 items a month, but 13.6% ($0.68) and $0.40 per order on the sale — $1.08 off a $5 sale. With us: 10¢ to list (30¢ a year if unsold), and on the sale, the card’s own processing cost passed through plus 3% — the exact total depends on what the card itself charged, which is why it is not rounded here.
On a single sale, the listing fee is a rounding error next to the transaction fee. Across fifty listings sitting unsold for a year, Etsy’s $0.60-per-item renewal becomes $30; ours, at $0.30 per item, becomes $15. “Cheapest” is not one number — it depends on how many items you list and how many of them sell, which is exactly why a calculator beats a rounded example: run your own catalogue size and price at /tools/fees.
At $15, Etsy’s sale-side fee is $1.675 (6.5% plus 3% and $0.25) plus the $0.20 listing fee, for roughly $1.875 total; eBay’s 13.6% plus $0.40 comes to $2.44. The ranking is the same as at $5, but the gap between them has widened in dollar terms even as both percentages stayed fixed — which is exactly why the calculator recomputes a comparison at your own price instead of extrapolating from one example.
With us, the sale-side portion at $15 is 3% of $15 ($0.45) plus whatever the card itself charged, plus the 10¢ listing fee — a lower known floor than either Etsy’s $1.875 or eBay’s $2.44, before the card’s own unrounded cost is added. That known floor is why the comparison is worth re-running at every price you actually sell at, not just the one example that happened to be convenient to write out here.
It depends on the price: eBay has no listing fee on the first 250 items a month but takes a larger percentage (13.6% plus $0.40) on the sale, while Etsy charges a small recurring listing fee and a smaller percentage (6.5% plus 3% and $0.25) on the sale. A low-priced, frequently-renewed catalogue and a higher-priced, less frequent one can come out differently.
It should - a single listing makes the recurring fee nearly invisible, while fifty listings make it one of the largest costs in the whole comparison.
Because the only variable part - the card processing cost - is passed through at whatever it actually was, not marked up or rounded by us into a flat percentage.
Part of our guide to Selling digital downloads.