The headline rate is only true on expensive items

The number on the pricing page is a limit, not a rate

Every marketplace advertises a percentage. Etsy says 6.5%, PayPal says 3.49%, Poshmark says 20%. Those numbers are accurate and they are also the best case — the rate you approach as the sale gets larger, and never quite reach.

The reason is that almost every platform also charges something fixed: a listing fee, a per-order fee, a flat component on payment processing. A fixed charge is a constant number of cents, so as a share of the sale it grows as the sale shrinks. On a $100 order it disappears into the rounding. On a $3 order it is the fee.

So the question this page answers is not what each platform charges. It is at what price the advertised rate starts telling the truth. Across the 29 platforms measured here, the ones with a fixed charge get there anywhere from $7.75 on eBay to $33.00 on PayPal.

What a $3 sale actually costs

Same item, no shipping, each platform on its default settings. The last column is how many times worse the $3 rate is than the $100.00 rate on that same platform.

Poshmark is the extreme: 98.3% of a $3 sale, against 20% of a $100 one. Its flat $2.95 fee does not care that the item was cheap, so on a $3 listing the seller keeps $0.05. Below $2.95 the fee is the entire sale and the seller keeps nothing at all.

Seven platforms charge the same rate at every price

These have no fixed component. Their advertised rate is their actual rate on a $3 sale and on a $3,000 one, which makes them the only ones where the published number can be used directly.

That is 7 of 29. It is worth noticing that a flat percentage is not the same as a low one — Fiverr charges 20% on everything. The virtue here is predictability, not cheapness: what you are quoted is what you pay.

The price at which each rate becomes true

For the platforms that do charge something fixed, here is the lowest price at which the real rate finally comes within a quarter of its $100.00 rate. The $100.00 rate is used as the reference rather than the headline percentage, because on most of these the headline is a limit the sale never actually reaches — so comparing against it would never resolve.

PayPal is the slowest to settle: even at $100.00 it is still charging 4%, and it does not get there until roughly $33.00. A seller moving $20.00 items on it is paying a materially different rate from the one quoted, every time.

What this does not say

It does not say to avoid cheap items, and it does not name a platform to use. A fixed fee is a real cost on a small sale, but so is the hour spent photographing and listing it, and a platform that charges more may also be the one that actually finds the buyer. This page prices one part of that decision and leaves the rest of it alone.

What it does say is narrower and checkable: on 22 of 29 platforms, the advertised percentage understates the cost of a small sale, sometimes severely, and the size of that gap is knowable in advance rather than discovered afterwards.

Check your own numbers

Every figure above comes from the same engine behind the calculators, so you can put your own price into Grailed, PayPal, Poshmark or any other platform and see the itemised arithmetic rather than the summary.

Two related findings sit next door: Poshmark’s $15 threshold, where raising your price lowers your payout, which is the same flat fee seen from the other side; and what the shipping you charge costs you in fees, which is the other number that does not behave the way sellers expect. The opposite end of the price range — the few platforms whose rate falls on a large sale — is in fees on expensive items.