eBay consignment fees: what you actually keep

When you consign on eBay, every sale pays two fees: eBay’s own selling fee, and the consignment service’s fee. Most people compare services on the second one alone, by its percentage. What actually decides your payout is what each percentage is calculated on, and what else comes out before the money reaches you.

We run a consignment service that sells on eBay, Poshmark and Mercari, so these are numbers we work through on every sale. Below is the whole calculation, line by line, for two sales.

The two layers of fees

Layer one is eBay’s. For most categories eBay charges 13.6% plus $0.40 per order, and the 13.6% is applied to everything the buyer paid: item price, shipping and sales tax. We walked through exactly how that works, with two real settlements, in What eBay actually charges. It applies whether you sell yourself or through a consignor; eBay doesn’t care who listed the item.

Layer two is the consignment service’s. It pays for the work you’re not doing: photographing, writing the listing, answering buyers, packing, shipping and handling returns. It’s usually quoted as a percentage. But a percentage of what?

A full sale, start to finish

Here’s an $89 item, with the buyer paying $12.95 shipping and $8.16 sales tax. This is the exact calculation we use for our own consignors, where our fee is 10% of what the buyer paid:

Item price	$89.00
Shipping charged to buyer	$12.95
Sales tax	$8.16
Buyer paid	$110.11
Sales tax, remitted by eBay to the state	−$8.16
eBay fee (13.6% of $110.11 + $0.40)	−$15.37
Shipping label	−$11.20
eBay order earnings	$75.38
Consignment fee (10% of $110.11)	−$11.01
To the consignor	$64.37

That’s 72% of the $89 item price. Measured against the $110.11 the buyer handed over, it’s 58%. Both figures are true; they just answer different questions. When a service shows you an example payout, check which one it’s quoting.

Same “percentage”, different payouts

Here is the same $89 sale under a few different ways a consignment fee could be worded. eBay’s side is identical in every row, so only the consignment fee changes:

If the consignment fee is…	You keep
10% of what the buyer paid ($11.01)	$64.37
10% of the item price ($8.90)	$66.48
10% of eBay’s payout ($7.54)	$67.84
30% of eBay’s payout ($22.61)	$52.77

The three “10%” rows are $3.47 apart on one sale. Across a box of 30 items that adds up. A 30% fee on eBay’s payout leaves you at least $11.60 less than any of them.

None of these structures is wrong. They’re just different, and a quote that only says “10%” or “30%” isn’t enough to compare services on. Ask for one worked example, start to finish, like the table above.

Small items keep less

The same arithmetic on a real eBay sale of a $12.95 item, where the buyer paid $11.95 shipping and $0.91 tax:

Item price	$12.95
Shipping charged to buyer	$11.95
Sales tax	$0.91
Buyer paid	$25.81
Sales tax, remitted by eBay to the state	−$0.91
eBay fee (13.6% of $25.81 + $0.40)	−$3.91
Shipping label	−$9.45
eBay order earnings	$11.54
Consignment fee (10% of $25.81)	−$2.58
To the consignor	$8.96

That’s 69% of the item price, and on this sale shipping happened to come out ahead (the buyer paid $2.50 more than the label cost). On a cheaper item, or one where postage costs more than the buyer paid, the share drops quickly, because eBay’s $0.40 per order and the label don’t shrink with the price. That’s why many consignment services, ours included, prefer items that sell for more than a few dollars.

What else can come out of a payout

The fee on each sale is the big number, but it’s rarely the only one. These are the charges worth asking about:

Shipping to the service. Someone pays for the box to get there. Some services send you a prepaid label and take its cost from your first sales; others expect you to pay it or drop items off.
Storage. Items that take months to sell take up shelf space. Some services charge for it, monthly, per item or by size. Ask how it’s worked out and whether it can ever exceed what an item sells for.
Promoted listings. If an item sells through eBay’s paid placement, there’s an ad fee on top of the selling fee. Find out whether the service uses it, and who pays.
Returns. eBay buyers can return items. Ask what happens to your payout if a sale is returned after you’ve been credited.
Items that don’t sell. Is there a fee for taking an item back? Are unsold items returned to you, donated, or marked down after a set time?
Who sets the price. A service earning a percentage has a reason to price for a quick sale. Ask whether you approve each price before it’s listed.

For what it’s worth, here is how we handle those: a prepaid label we recoup from a box’s first sales (never more than 25% of any one sale), storage based on your box’s size, no fulfillment fee on anything that doesn’t sell, and a suggested price on every item that you approve or counter before it’s listed. The full breakdown is on our eBay consignment service page.

Is eBay consignment worth it?

It comes down to what your time is worth against what you give up per sale. On the $89 sale above, selling it yourself would have kept $75.38; consigning kept $64.37. The $11.01 difference paid for the photos, the listing, the questions, the packing and the trip to the post office.

Consignment tends to make sense when:

you have more items than time, and they’re sitting unsold,
the items are worth enough that the fixed costs don’t eat the sale,
you want them listed on more than one marketplace without managing several accounts.

It’s a harder sell for a handful of low-priced items you could list in an evening.

Before you send anything, ask for this

One question covers most of the above: “Can you show me what I’d receive from a $50 sale, line by line?” A service that can answer it clearly, with eBay’s fee, shipping, its own fee and anything else itemized, is one whose payouts you’ll be able to check. If the answer is just a percentage, keep asking.

eBay’s 13.6% + $0.40 is the standard rate for most categories as of October 2026. Some categories, store subscriptions and seller performance levels change it. Check eBay’s current selling fees for your category before relying on any figure here.