Ebay vs Amazon fees

Hi,

This is not specifically a GarageSale topic, but I believe users of GarageSale are more concerned than those of you other softwares.

In the Excel file within the attached zip archive, I tried to compare (Ebay + PayPal) vs (Amazon + AmazonPay) for items with prices ranging from 5 $ to 300 $.

As I’m only selling on Ebay and have no experience with Amazon, an outside look wil be welcome, to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything.

To keep things simple, the following assumptions were done:

  • The seller is American and sells in USD on Amazon.com and Ebay.com.
  • The seller is an individual with less than 40 sales a month, without paid sales plan. (No monthly fix fee.)
  • The category is “consumer electronics” (on some other categories Amazon referral fee is higher).
  • The price was assumed being the sum of the product price and shipping cost and fees are assumed applying on both.
  • The seller is assumed having his own warehouse and shipping himself.
  • Ebay’s free monthly listings were ignored.
  • For international payments, PayPal’s fixed fee depends on the currency received and is not known ; the same fixed fee was assumed as for domestic payments.
  • Special fees like for instance Amazon Pay’s chargeback were ignored.

Of course, all these computations have to be adjusted to the category you’re selling in and to your country as fees depends on them.

Update table, version 2.0:
Marketplaces-and-payment-processor-fees-for-American-individual-seller_v2.zip (10.0 KB)

I am not an Amazon seller unfortunately and I am not based in the US. I can’t reply to your questions, sorry, but apart your calculations, I would take in consideration another matter, which is that Amazon is undoubtedly a better channel for “consumer electronics”, as far as I know. Maybe you pay more fees, but they should be definitely compensated by much more transactions for that kind of products’ category… glad to hear any tip from users who are more informed.

There is an error in my table.
I see that PayPal variable fee is more for international payments: for US users, there’s a 4.4% transaction fee plus a fixed fee based on currency received. I could not find which the fix fee is when receiveing money.

(@fedege96: Consumer electronics can also be spare parts. In this case eBay is probably a better place, but that’s another question. Here, I just want to compare the fees for international sales with the two marketplaces and their most commonly used payment system.)

Table corrected in original post, with domestic and cross-border payments taken into account.

Hello Leon,
thank you for clarification, I misunderstood the “consumer electronics” category, that’s very different in my ebay site.
I can only add another variable to your work. PayPal change rate is extremely complicated to track if you sell on other websites with other currencies. Then there is that variable % on foreign transaction, but as far as I know, I have a specific % depending on which country I receive money from. Payment from US have a different % then other countries, but maybe there are just differences between our websites. Fixed amount is 0,35€ and I think 0,30$ in the US. Very complicated to track down PayPal fees…

This is not in English but there are quite clear tables that might help you somehow: https://www.paypal.com/it/webapps/mpp/ua/useragreement-full#r017

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