Methodology
Don't trust our fee numbers.
Check them against eBay's.
Buried in eBay's seller documentation are worked examples where they show the arithmetic: a sale, the fees, the payout. They are the only published answers that are unarguably correct, because eBay wrote them. We run every one of them through this site's calculator on each build and print both answers below. All 27 figures match eBay's published arithmetic exactly.
eBay's examples, recomputed
That is seven examples and 27 separate figures. The left column is what eBay publishes. The middle column is what this site's engine returns when it is handed the same sale. Nothing in the middle column is stored — it is computed when the page is built.
| Figure | eBay publishes | listmargin computes | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seller Center 'Selling fee scenarios' — Marco: Sports Equipment The buyer pays $210.50, which includes a $50 shipping charge and a $10.50 sales tax. Final value fees, calculated at 13.6% of the $210.50 payment, plus a $0.40 per order fee, are $29.03. | |||
| Order total (what the buyer paid) | $210.50 | $210.50 | match |
| Final value fee | $28.63 | $28.63 | match |
| Per-order fee | $0.40 | $0.40 | match |
| Total eBay fees | $29.03 | $29.03 | match |
| Seller payout | $170.97 | $170.97 | match |
| Profit after costs | $120.97 | $120.97 | match |
| Seller Center 'Selling fee scenarios' — Val: Clothing The skirt later sells for $85.60 after sales tax... fees are $12.04... payout of $67.96... After paying all fees and spending $5 to ship the skirt, she nets $60.61. | |||
| Order total (what the buyer paid) | $85.60 | $85.60 | match |
| Final value fee | $11.64 | $11.64 | match |
| Per-order fee | $0.40 | $0.40 | match |
| Seller payout | $67.96 | $67.96 | match |
| Profit after costs | $60.61 | $60.61 | match |
| Seller Center 'Selling fee scenarios' — Chad: Sneakers After taxes, the total of the order was $270. Chad will pay 8% on the total amount of the sale, including tax, making his selling fee $21.60. | |||
| Order total (what the buyer paid) | $270.00 | $270.00 | match |
| Final value fee | $21.60 | $21.60 | match |
| Per-order fee | $0.00 | $0.00 | match |
| Total eBay fees | $21.60 | $21.60 | match |
| Seller Center 'Selling fee scenarios' — Jodie: Cell Phones, no Store Without a Store subscription, or with a Starter Store subscription, Jodie pays $73.89 in fees. | |||
| Order total (what the buyer paid) | $540.35 | $540.35 | match |
| Total eBay fees | $73.89 | $73.89 | match |
| Seller Center 'Selling fee scenarios' — Jodie: Cell Phones, Basic Store with a Basic Store subscription, she'd pay only 9.35% per item plus $0.40 per order... she pays $50.92 in fees. | |||
| Order total (what the buyer paid) | $540.35 | $540.35 | match |
| Final value fee | $50.52 | $50.52 | match |
| Per-order fee | $0.40 | $0.40 | match |
| Total eBay fees | $50.92 | $50.92 | match |
| selling-fees help page, worked example table Insertion fee $0.35 | Final value fee (13.6% of $424, + $0.40) $58.06 | Total fees $58.41 | |||
| Order total (what the buyer paid) | $424.00 | $424.00 | match |
| Final value fee | $57.66 | $57.66 | match |
| Per-order fee | $0.40 | $0.40 | match |
| Total eBay fees | $58.41 | $58.41 | match |
| selling-fees help page, worked example table Final value fee (13.25% of $7,500, + 2.35% of $2,570, + $0.40) $1,054.55 | Bold fee $4.00 | Insertion $0.35 | Total fees $1,058.90 | |||
| Order total (what the buyer paid) | $10,070.00 | $10,070.00 | match |
| Total eBay fees | $1,058.90 | $1,058.90 | match |
The comparison runs on every build, and the same computation runs in the test suite. If the two columns ever disagree, this page says MISMATCH in the row that broke, and the build fails before it can ship. That is deliberate: a page whose only job is being checkable must not be able to claim a match it did not get.
How to check us yourself
Everything above is reproducible without taking our word for anything. Search eBay's Seller Center for their selling-fee scenarios, and their help pages for the worked-example tables printed beside the fee schedule. Take any sale they show, enter the same item price, the same shipping charged and the same sales tax into the calculator, and compare.
If you find a case where we disagree with eBay's own published arithmetic, we want to know more than you do — that is a bug in the thing this whole site rests on. Send it to hello@listmargin.com and it gets fixed.
Four places fee maths usually goes wrong
These are the details that separate a calculator matching eBay's examples from one that is close enough to look right. Each one is a real difference, not a rounding preference.
The fee base includes the sales tax
eBay charges the final value fee on the full amount the buyer paid, and the buyer paid the sales tax too. The tax never reaches you — eBay collects and remits it — but it is still in the base the percentage is taken from. A calculator that bills the item price alone understates every order, and understates it by more as the tax rate rises. eBay's own worked examples are the proof: their totals only reconcile when the tax is in the base.
Shipping you charged is part of the sale
Charging the buyer for postage does not move that money outside the fee. It is part of what the buyer paid, so it is part of what the percentage applies to. Shifting price into shipping does not reduce the fee.
The per-order fee has a threshold, and exemptions
It is $0.30 on orders up to $10 and $0.40 above that. It is charged once per order, however many items are in it. It is also waived entirely in some categories above a price threshold — athletic shoes at $150 and up pay no per-order fee at all. It is the smallest number on the invoice and the one most often wrong, in both directions.
Some categories re-rate the whole sale, not just the excess
Most category thresholds are marginal: cross the boundary and only the portion above it changes rate. A few are not. Cross the threshold in those and the entire sale re-rates, so a single cent of extra price can move the whole fee. Treating a cliff as marginal, or the reverse, produces an answer that is correct on one side of the boundary and wrong on the other — which is why both sides of every boundary are tested rather than the middle.
What this page does not prove
A methodology page that only lists its strengths is marketing. These are the things the comparison above genuinely cannot establish, stated plainly because you would find them anyway.
- It inherits eBay's own arithmetic. Every figure here is graded against what eBay published. If one of eBay's worked examples is itself wrong, our matching it is not a virtue and this page would not detect it.
- It covers the cases eBay chose to publish. Their examples are a handful of sales, not the whole fee schedule. Matching all of them proves the engine handles those paths, not every category and every boundary.
- It says nothing about how current the rates are. Matching a worked example proves the arithmetic. Whether the underlying rate table is today's is a separate question, answered by the effective date at the foot of this page and by the schedule the calculator loads.
- Promoted Listings, refunds and disputes are not in eBay's examples. The calculator models an ad rate because sellers ask for it, but no published eBay example pins that arithmetic, so it is not evidenced here.
The calculator this describes
Everything above is about one tool: a free eBay fee calculator with no signup and no gate. If you want the same engine applied to margin and ROI rather than fees, the profit calculator is the same maths in seller's terms. Category rates are broken out in store fees and insertion fees.