Every marketplace selling digital files falls into one of two fee shapes. Once you can name the shape, comparing any two of them gets much simpler.
This is Etsy’s shape: $0.20 to list, renewed automatically every four months regardless of sales ($0.60 a year per unsold item), and on a sale, 6.5% plus 3% and $0.25 in processing. The recurring fee is the price of staying visible even when nothing is selling; the sale-side fee is moderate relative to the other shape.
This shape rewards a catalogue that sells reasonably often, because the recurring fee is small and gets amortized across every sale a listing eventually makes. It is a worse shape for a large catalogue of items that mostly do not sell, since every one of them keeps accruing the renewal charge regardless.
A seller choosing between the two shapes is really choosing which failure mode they would rather have: a slow drip of renewal fees on unsold items, or a bigger bite only on the items that actually sell.
This is eBay’s shape: 250 free listings a month before any insertion fee applies, and on a sale, 13.6% plus $0.40 per order. There is no small recurring charge eating at an unsold catalogue, but the percentage taken when something does sell is larger — on a $5 sale, eBay’s $1.08 against Etsy’s $0.725, even though eBay charged nothing to list it.
We use the same recurring shape as Etsy — 10¢ to list, renewed every four months, 30¢ a year if unsold — but a smaller sale-side fee: the card’s own processing cost, passed through, plus 3%, with no separate transaction fee layered on. That makes it closer to Etsy’s shape than eBay’s, just lighter at both the listing fee and the sale fee. Which shape actually costs less for your catalogue depends on how many items you list against how often they sell — run the real numbers at /tools/fees rather than picking a shape on reputation.
A listing that sells only rarely spends a larger share of its lifetime fees on Etsy’s $0.60-a-year renewal relative to eBay’s zero-cost listing; a listing that sells every week barely notices the renewal fee at all, and the comparison then comes down to 6.5% plus processing against 13.6% plus $0.40 on the sale itself — the numbers already shown above. There is no single crossover point that holds at every price and every sales rate; recompute it for your own catalogue at /tools/fees.
A seller with a hundred slow-moving listings and a seller with ten fast-moving ones can both call themselves “on Etsy” while facing completely different fee shapes in practice — the first is paying mostly in renewals, the second mostly in transaction and processing fees. Knowing which one describes your own catalogue is what tells you whether the recurring fee or the sale-side percentage is the number actually worth negotiating down first.
The free-tier shape (like eBay's 250 free listings) costs less while nothing is selling, since there is no recurring listing charge eating at unsold items.
The lower sale-side percentage shape costs less once items are actually selling regularly, since the recurring listing fee becomes small next to the fees on frequent sales.
This page compares the shapes behind Etsy, eBay and our own fees specifically - the two shapes described are the ones behind the numbers given here, not a claim about every marketplace that exists.
Part of our guide to Selling digital downloads.