Why are eBay fees so high?
Because the percentage isn't charged on what you think it is.
The headline rate for most categories is 13.6%, which doesn't sound outrageous. The gap between that number and what leaves your payout comes from three mechanics, all published by eBay, all easy to miss. None of this is speculation — you can check every one of them against your own sold orders.
You pay a fee on the sales tax
The final value fee is charged on the total the buyer pays: item price, shipping, and sales tax. eBay collects that tax from the buyer and remits it to the state. You never receive it. You still pay 13.6% of it. On a typical order with shipping and tax, the effective rate on the money that actually reaches you runs meaningfully above the headline number. That single mechanic is most of the answer to this page's question.
Charging on shipping has a defensible logic — it kills the old trick of a one-cent item with fifty dollars of "shipping". Charging on remitted tax has no equivalent story. It's simply how the fee is defined, and it's worth knowing when you price.
The per-order fee stacks on top
Every order also carries a flat fee: $0.30 on orders of $10 or less, $0.40 above that. On expensive items it disappears into rounding. On cheap items it's real money — on a five-dollar order the flat fee alone is several percent, before the final value fee touches anything. Low-priced, high-volume sellers feel this more than any rate.
Some categories re-rate the entire sale
Most categories are marginal, like tax brackets: the higher rate applies up to a threshold and a lower rate to the portion above. Four are not: jewelry, bullion, women's handbags and athletic shoes work as cliffs, where crossing the threshold changes the rate on the whole sale.
Jewelry is the clearest case. Below $5,000, the rate is 15% on everything. Above it, the whole sale re-rates to 9%. So a six-thousand-dollar jewelry sale pays a smaller fee than a five-thousand-dollar one — and a six-thousand-dollar camera sale, sitting in the marginal most-categories table, behaves completely differently. Sellers who don't know which kind of category they're in get surprised in both directions.
Check your own numbers
The calculator applies all three mechanics to a sale you type in — category rate, tax base, per-order fee, cliffs — and itemises the result, so you can see exactly where your payout went. It reads eBay's full published schedule, not the four-line summary.