Most “X vs Y” fee comparisons have no crossover price

The claim this tests

Almost every “X vs Y fees” article is built on the same promise: that somewhere there is a price where the cheaper platform swaps, and knowing it tells you where to list. It is a satisfying shape for an article. It is mostly not true.

We ran every pair on this site through the fee engine at every price from $0.50 to $20,000, comparing what actually reaches your account, and recorded where the answer flips.

The result

Of 9 pairs, 7 never cross at any price. One platform wins at $1 and the same platform still wins at $20,000. There is no threshold to find, and an article naming one has invented it.

Only 2 cross at all. Etsy vs eBay crosses at $3.64 — driven by the interaction between a flat listing fee and a per-order fee, which is the sort of thing that only matters on small orders. Mercari vs eBay technically crosses too, at $11,034.55, which is high enough that it is a curiosity rather than advice.

What decides it instead

Settings, not price. Whether an Etsy sale came through Offsite Ads, whether a Square payment was taken in person or online, which Amazon category the item sits in — each of these moves the answer far more than the price does, and several reverse it outright. That is why each head-to-head page works out which settings flip the result rather than naming a number.

This is a less satisfying answer than a crossover price, which is presumably why it is not the one usually published. It is the one the arithmetic gives.

What this comparison is not

Cheapest is not best, and this site will not tell you where to sell. eBay and Etsy bring you a buyer; a payment processor does not. A platform that takes a larger percentage while selling far more of your stock is the better platform, and no fee table can weigh that for you. What the table above settles is narrow and worth settling: whether there is a price at which the fee answer changes. Usually there is not.

Every rate behind this is read from the platform’s own published schedule and carries the date it was read — see how we verify, or take the whole set as open data.