How the eBay fee calculator works
There are two questions hiding inside "what does eBay charge?" The first is easy arithmetic: a percentage, a fixed fee, and maybe an ad rate. The second is the one that actually decides whether the hobby is worth your Saturday: after the fees, the postage, the six dollars you handed the guy at the estate sale, and the ninety minutes it took, did this flip make money? This page answers both, in that order, because the first answer without the second is how people end up busy and broke.
Enter the sale price, the shipping you charged, what the label really cost, and what you paid for the item. You get eBay's fee stack line by line, the effective rate you actually paid (which is never the headline rate), and the profit on the flip. Add the minutes and it becomes an hourly wage. Add a dud rate and it becomes something rarer still: an honest look at the pile in the corner that is not going to sell.
The formula
final value fee = total amount of the sale × category rate (13.6% for most categories)
per order fee = $0.30 if the order is $10.00 or less, otherwise $0.40
ad fee = total amount of the sale × your Promoted Listings ad rate
profit = total amount of the sale − final value fee − per order fee − ad fee − postage you paid − what the item cost you
The line that catches people is the first one. eBay's own fee page defines the total amount of the sale as the item price plus handling plus the shipping the buyer paid plus sales tax, so the percentage is charged on the whole thing. Two small honesty notes on this page's model. It leaves sales tax out of the fee base, because you never see that money and the rate depends on the buyer's address, which means the real fee is a shade higher than what we show, not lower. And it prices one sale: insertion fees, returns, and the $20 dispute fee that arrives with a chargeback live outside a single flip. Above $7,500 most categories drop to 2.35% on the portion over the line, which the calculator handles if you ever get there.
Worked example
A jacket bought for $6 at a thrift store, sold for $45 with $8 shipping charged. The label cost $7. Most categories, no promoted listing, and 90 minutes from spotting it on the rack to handing it over at the post office.
Total amount of the sale: $45 + $8 = $53.00. Final value fee: 13.6% of $53.00 = $7.21. Per order fee: $0.40, because the order is over $10. eBay keeps $7.61, which is 14.4% of the money the buyer handed over, not 13.6%.
Profit: $53.00 minus $7.61 of fees minus $7.00 of postage minus $6.00 for the jacket = $32.39, or 61.1% of the sale. Your $6.00 buy returned about 5.4x what you put in, and this one would have broken even at a sale price of about $7.51.
Now the two numbers nobody puts on the screenshot. Ninety minutes for $32.39 is $21.59 an hour before any tax. And the shipping line lost money: you collected $8.00, paid $7.00 for the label, and eBay took $1.09 of that $8.00, so the shipping you "profited" on actually cost you 9 cents. If one item in five never sells, this flip also has to carry $1.50 of dead stock, leaving $30.89.
eBay charges its fee on your shipping too
This is the trap, and it is the same one Etsy sets. Sellers reason that shipping is a pass-through: the buyer pays $8, the post office takes $7, you pocket a dollar for the box and the tape. But eBay's percentage is charged on the total amount of the sale, and shipping is expressly part of that total. So the dollar you thought you kept is really a dollar minus 13.6% of eight dollars, and in the worked example above that turns a $1.00 gain into a 9 cent loss.
The useful corollary is that it makes no fee difference whether you charge shipping separately or roll it into the price and offer free shipping. A $53 item with free shipping and a $45 item with $8 shipping pay exactly the same eBay fee, to the cent. Free shipping tends to win anyway, because it converts better and because buyers filter for it, but choose it for that reason and not because someone told you it saves on fees. What genuinely saves money on this line is the boring stuff: weighing the parcel properly, using eBay's discounted labels, and not paying for a box when a padded envelope would have done.
Free listings, and when a Store actually pays for itself
Sellers without a Store get 250 zero insertion fee listings a month, after which eBay charges $0.35 per listing. The fee is charged per listing and per category, is not refunded when the item does not sell, and is charged again on every relist. The quiet trap is Good Til Cancelled listings, which renew once a calendar month and count against the allowance each time, so a seller with 300 dormant listings burns through the free tier without listing a single new thing.
Here is the Store arithmetic, in one sentence you can check. A Basic Store is $21.95 a month on yearly renewal, and it cuts the most-categories final value fee from 13.6% to 12.7%. That is a saving of 0.9 percentage points, so the subscription pays for itself on the fee discount alone at $21.95 divided by 0.009, which is about $2,439 of sales a month. Below that you are buying listing allowance (1,000 instead of 250) and Store tools, which may still be worth it. And one detail worth reading twice before you pick the cheapest tier: a Starter Store's final value fees are identical to having no Store at all. Put eBay's two fee tables side by side and the Starter column matches the no-Store column row for row. It buys you cheaper insertion fees and a storefront, not a lower percentage.
Promoted Listings: you are partly bidding against yourself
The mechanics are genuinely seller-friendly on paper. You set an ad rate anywhere from 2% to 100% of the total sale amount, and you pay it only when the promoted item actually sells within 30 days of a click. No sale, no charge. Compared with paying per click and hoping, that is a good deal.
The catch is attribution. A buyer who searches for the exact thing you are selling, finds your listing at the top because it is the best match, clicks it, and buys it, may well have arrived through a promoted slot, and you pay the ad rate on a sale you had already won. That is the part nobody advertises. It is also not a reason to switch ads off: in a category with ten thousand near-identical listings, the ad rate is close to the price of appearing at all, and a listing nobody sees converts at zero. The reasonable stance is the boring one. Start near the bottom of the range, treat eBay's suggested rate as a suggestion rather than an instruction, and check whether your promoted items are genuinely selling faster than your unpromoted ones rather than just selling with a fee attached. Enter your rate above and the calculator prices it against everything else.
The cost nobody prices: your own time
Every fee calculator on the internet will tell you eBay took $7.61. Almost none of them will tell you the flip paid $21.59 an hour, and that is the number that decides whether you do this next weekend. Sourcing is the expensive part and it is invisible: the drive, the two hours in the bins, the four items you passed on. Then photographing, writing the listing, answering three questions from someone who does not buy, and packing.
Put your honest minutes in the field above, including the sourcing time for the trip amortised across what you actually found, and read the hourly figure without flinching. Some flips are excellent: a $6 item that sells for $45 in ninety minutes is a good ninety minutes. Some are a wage you would refuse from an employer. The pattern that shows up almost immediately is that the time cost barely changes with the price of the item. A $200 item takes about as long to list and pack as a $20 one. That single fact is the whole argument for sourcing up rather than sourcing more.
Dead inventory is why flipping looks better on paper
Every flip you post about is one that sold. The ones that did not are still in the spare room. That is not a character flaw, it is just what a portfolio looks like, and it is the reason a shelf full of individually profitable flips can add up to a disappointing year.
The arithmetic is simple once you name it. If one in five things you buy never finds a buyer, then for every item that sells, a quarter of an item does not. At $6 a piece that is $1.50 of dead stock riding on every sale, which turns the worked example's $32.39 into $30.89. At a 40% dud rate it is $4.00 a sale. Nothing about that says stop; it says that the buy decision, not the sell decision, is where flipping is won, and that "I can always sell it for something" is the most expensive sentence in the hobby. Put your own number in the dud field. If you do not know it, the fact that you do not know it is itself worth sitting with for a moment.
Taxes, and what the 1099-K really means
Profit from reselling is taxable income whether or not any form arrives. The federal Form 1099-K threshold was restored to more than $20,000 and more than 200 transactions, both conditions required, and several states set theirs lower. That threshold decides who gets paperwork, not who owes tax, and the difference catches people out every spring. If reselling is a regular, business-like activity for you, it generally lands on Schedule C, where self-employment tax of 15.3% applies to net earnings once they pass $400 for the year, on top of income tax. Selling off your own used household things for less than you paid is a different situation and usually is not taxable income at all.
The good news is that the cost side is real. Your sourcing cost, eBay's fees, postage, packaging, mileage to the thrift store, and your Store subscription are generally deductible against the income, which is a strong argument for keeping receipts and a simple spreadsheet from the first flip rather than the first audit. This page deliberately computes no tax, because your bracket and your structure change the answer; our quarterly tax calculator handles the estimated payments, and a tax professional beats any calculator on the hobby-versus-business question.