Marketplace Fee Comparison

All three charge on the same base

Each marketplace defines its fee base as the total the buyer pays. Amazon puts it as “An item’s total price includes its list price, as well as shipping costs and any gift-wrapping charges.” Walmart’s table says “Total sales price includes item price as well as shipping and handling, gift wrap and other charges.” eBay charges on the total amount of the sale, shipping included. So the item price and the shipping you collect go in together, and that one number is the base for all three columns.

Amazon and Walmart come from their own rate tables

Both pages publish a referral-fee table by category, and both are re-read from the official pages we keep on record, line by line, on every test run. Amazon’s rows carry their own minimum - most rows floor at $0.30 - and media rows add a $1.80 per-item closing fee. Walmart’s referral table prints no minimum-amount column and no per-order fee, so no Walmart figure here carries a floor.

Where a rate steps at a price hinge (5% / 10% / 17% for apparel, 8% / 15% for several electronic categories), the whole-sale rate that applies at the price you entered is the one shown, so the fee column is the single percentage times the base.

The eBay column is the eBay Fee Calculator’s own table

eBay charges a final value fee that depends on the category - 13.6% on most sales - plus a flat per-order fee of $0.30 on orders of $10 or less and $0.40 above. Rather than re-typing that schedule, this page reads the same committed table the eBay Fee Calculator ships, so the two pages cannot disagree about eBay’s rate.

Only books, movies and music, and watches have an eBay row that names the category outright. Every other row uses the closest rate eBay prints - “Most categories” at 13.6% for consumer electronics, appliances, computers and accessories, 15% for apparel - and the page says which row it used and how it differs, rather than pretending the two taxonomies match.

The floors and the per-order fee are inside the column

The question this page answers is what you keep, so a fee line is never quietly dropped. Amazon’s $0.30 minimum is applied where the row carries it, media rows add the $1.80 per-item closing fee, and eBay’s per-order fee is added to its percentage - which is why eBay can look dearer than a 13.6% rate suggests on a cheap item.

What is left out is what the fee pages themselves leave out of the referral fee: insertion fees, listing upgrades, store subscriptions, payment processing and advertising. Each is named on the page rather than folded into a column.