Fee and profit calculation methodology

We estimate seller profit by separating revenue, platform fees and your operating costs. Marketplace tools use a reviewed US / USD snapshot; the margin and target tools use your own fee assumptions. All arithmetic reconciles internally in cents, while platform invoice equality is not guaranteed.

Revenue and profit

Seller revenue is item price plus buyer-paid shipping and, on Etsy, gift wrapping. Marketplace-collected sales tax is excluded. Net profit = seller revenue − selling fees − product cost − shipping cost − other costs. Total costs include every fee component and every entered expense, so revenue always equals total costs plus net profit in cents.

Profit margin = net profit ÷ seller revenue × 100. Zero revenue produces an unavailable margin; losses remain negative. A completed zero-price scenario can still have fixed fees.

Precision and rounding

Inputs accept plain nonnegative decimal amounts with at most two decimal places. Decimal strings are parsed directly to integer cents. Percentage multiplication and progressive-tier arithmetic use BigInt numerators; monetary fee multiplication does not use floating-point arithmetic. Each fee component is rounded half-up to cents. Progressive tier portions are summed before rounding that component. Displayed margin is rounded to two decimal percentage places.

The official pages reviewed do not establish the exact half-cent tie handling or every invoice allocation detail. Half-up is our documented estimate assumption, not an independently verified platform rounding promise. Check an account invoice for actual billing. Internal fee and profit reconciliation is exact even when an estimate differs from a platform invoice.

Rule evidence and dates

The shared snapshot notice supplies the actual source check date and internal review deadline. Both today in UTC and the requested order date must fall within that verified window. Backdating an order does not revive an expired snapshot. An open calculator tab clears old results when the review deadline is reached. This is our freshness window; it does not claim those are historical platform rate-effective dates. Expired, missing, unverified or overlapping rules stop calculation. Sources, dates and limitations appear on each calculator page in static HTML.

• eBay US fees
• eBay Store fees
• eBay General campaign
• Etsy fees policy
• Etsy Payments policy

Explicit marketplace coverage

eBay estimates cover six named categories and six subscription levels, one item in one domestic order. Standard shipping and sales tax contribute to the final value fee basis. A seller-entered attributed General ad rate uses the gross order basis. Special shipping, performance adjustments, international orders, refunds and unlisted categories are unsupported.

Etsy estimates cover a US seller and US bank account, USD listing and payment account, and one domestic Etsy.com order. Listing charges are allocated fixed charges; US transaction and Offsite Ads fees exclude tax while Payments includes it. You supply the actual Offsite Ads qualification and the count of allocated listing or renewal charges. Credits, fee taxes, Pattern, Square, currency conversion and refunds are not inferred.

Custom profit and inverse pricing

The margin calculator and target profit calculator use your single percentage selling fee plus a fixed fee, not a verified marketplace fee profile. Costs and shipping income remain fixed. The target tool finds the lowest cent item price satisfying both desired profit and minimum margin. A rational lower bound accounts for possible half-cent rounding, then a bounded ascending cent search recalculates each candidate forward; this is not a binary search. The margin target is compared against the exact ratio, not its rounded display. Targets requiring 100% or more of revenue after percentage fees are rejected.

Content review and maintenance

Guides render as static HTML from version-controlled MDX. Fee tables and dated examples read the same rule registry as the calculators. Source check dates describe the rate snapshot; article revision dates describe actual editorial changes. They are not replaced with a build date. First public publication is recorded only when it occurs; preview drafts display no invented publication date. Content acceptance and publication metadata are recorded through an explicit editorial review; automated checks do not perform that review.

When a rule changes, review its official evidence, update the snapshot through the maintenance procedure, inspect the dependent tables and examples, and review explanatory text for meaning changes. The build blocks content with a mismatched snapshot version. Unsupported policies and official half-cent tie handling remain pending verification rather than silently gaining fallback assumptions.

Privacy and calculation inputs

All calculations run in this browser. No transaction inputs are transmitted to a server or analytics service. See the Privacy policy for browser storage, hosting request data and email inquiries. Calculation methodology does not imply permission to enable analytics or other integrations.