Amazon FBA vs Etsy vs eBay: Where Should You Sell in 2026?

List an identical product on Etsy, eBay, and Amazon FBA at the exact same price, and you will not net the same amount on any of the three. That's not a hypothetical — it's the direct, mechanical result of three very different fee structures charging different percentages on different bases, with different optional costs layered on top depending on how each platform actually gets your product in front of a buyer.

Most sellers don't discover this until they're already committed to a platform, because most fee calculators — including the ones on this site until now — only ever look at one marketplace at a time. That's genuinely useful for pricing a specific listing you already know is going on Etsy, or Amazon, or eBay. It's much less useful for the earlier, more consequential decision: which platform should this product even go on in the first place.

This guide runs the same product through all three platforms' real fee formulas — not rough estimates, the exact math Etsy's fee calculator, eBay's fee calculator, and Amazon FBA's fee calculator each use — at two different price points, so you can see exactly where the numbers diverge and why. Along the way: what each platform is actually built for beyond its fee schedule, and a direct answer to the question sellers ask most — given that identical products can net meaningfully different amounts depending on where you list them, is there a faster way to check this than running three calculators by hand? There is — the Marketplace Fee Matrix does exactly that, in one pass, for your own numbers.

Before comparing outcomes, it helps to see the charge structure side by side — because the differences aren't just in the percentages, they're in what each percentage is even calculated against.

• Etsy — a flat $0.20 listing fee (renews automatically every four months while a listing stays active and unsold), a 6.5% transaction fee on item price plus shipping, and a 3% + $0.25 payment processing fee on the item price. Offsite Ads, when a sale is attributed to one of Etsy's own ads, adds a further 12-15% on top of the full order total — mandatory above $10,000 in trailing-12-month sales (at the lower 12% rate), optional below it (at 15%).
• eBay — a single category-based Final Value Fee, roughly 12.9-15% depending on category (13.6% is the common general-merchandise-and-apparel baseline), charged on item price plus shipping plus tax, plus a flat $0.30 per-order fee. Payment processing is already folded into that one percentage — there's no separate processing line, unlike Etsy.
• Amazon FBA — a referral fee (8-45% of item price depending on category, 15% is typical for general categories) plus a flat FBA fulfillment fee that Amazon sets per size and weight tier for picking, packing, and shipping the order. Sellers also pay separately to ship inventory to Amazon's warehouses in the first place, and monthly storage fees apply on top of both — a materially different cost shape than the two marketplaces above, where the seller ships each order individually as it sells.

Two structural differences matter more than the raw percentages themselves. First, Etsy's and eBay's percentage fees apply to your full order total — item price plus shipping — while Amazon's referral fee applies to item price alone, because Amazon's fulfillment fee is doing a different job: it's not a percentage of anything, it's a flat per-unit charge that already assumes Amazon, not the seller, handles the actual outbound shipping. Second, only Amazon adds a genuinely separate, ongoing cost — storage — that has nothing to do with any individual sale; Etsy's and eBay's fees are entirely transactional, charged only when something actually sells.

Fee percentages matter, but they're not the first thing that should decide where a product gets listed. Each of these three marketplaces was built around a different kind of shopper, and selling into the wrong one rarely works even at a great margin.

• Etsy is built for handmade, vintage (20+ years old), and craft-supply goods, and its entire discovery system — search, gift guides, curated collections — assumes buyers are looking for something distinctive rather than the cheapest version of a commodity item. A mass-produced product with no handmade or vintage story tends to underperform here regardless of price, and Etsy's own policies actively restrict what can be listed as handmade in the first place.
• Amazon FBA is built for scale and for sellers who want fulfillment, customer service, and returns handled for them. Prime eligibility is a genuine conversion advantage for commodity and branded goods where buyers are comparison-shopping on price and delivery speed rather than looking for something unique — but that same scale-first design is exactly why Amazon's cost structure includes storage and inbound freight that the other two platforms don't ask sellers to think about at all.
• eBay spans the widest range — new, used, refurbished, auction-format, and fixed-price listings across nearly every category — and remains the strongest option for used goods, collectibles, and items with real auction-format demand, where competitive bidding on a rare or hard-to-find item can outperform a fixed price entirely. Its simpler, single-percentage fee structure also makes it comparatively easy to model, even though the exact category rate still varies.

None of this means picking one platform and ignoring the others — plenty of sellers list the same catalog across two or three, especially once a product is proven. But the fee comparison below is only half the picture: a product built for Etsy's audience listed at an Etsy-competitive price on Amazon won't move regardless of how the margin math works out, and vice versa.

Numbers make this concrete faster than percentages do. Both examples below use each platform's own calculator formula exactly as it runs on this site — not rounded approximations — so you can trust the comparison, and re-run either one yourself on Etsy's, eBay's, or Amazon FBA's individual calculator pages.

Example 1 — a $35 item, $10 product cost, $5 shipping.

• Etsy: item $35, shipping charged to buyer $5, no Offsite Ads. Listing fee $0.20, transaction fee 6.5% × $40 = $2.60, payment processing 3% × $35 + $0.25 = $1.30. Total fees $4.10. Net profit: $35 − $4.10 − $10 = $20.90 (59.7% margin).
• eBay: same $35 item, $5 shipping, standard 13.6% category. Final Value Fee 13.6% × $40 = $5.44, plus the flat $0.30 per-order fee. Total fees $5.74. Net profit: $35 − $5.74 − $10 = $19.26 (55.0% margin).
• Amazon FBA: same $35 listing price, $10 product cost, a representative $1.50 per-unit inbound shipping cost and a $5.00 FBA fulfillment fee (a typical small-item example — pull your product's real fulfillment fee from Seller Central's Fee Preview report for an accurate number), 15% referral fee. Referral fee $5.25, total fees $10.25. Net profit: $35 − $5.25 − $5.00 − $10 − $1.50 = $13.25 (37.9% margin).

At this price point, Etsy nets the most, eBay is close behind, and Amazon FBA trails by a wide margin — not because Amazon is a worse platform, but because its fulfillment fee is doing real work (packing and shipping the order) that the seller is handling themselves, unpaid, on the other two.

Example 2 — a $150 item, $60 product cost, $8 shipping.

• Etsy: item $150, shipping $8, no Offsite Ads. Transaction fee 6.5% × $158 = $10.27, payment processing 3% × $150 + $0.25 = $4.75, listing fee $0.20. Total fees $15.22. Net profit: $150 − $15.22 − $60 = $74.78 (49.9% margin).
• eBay: same item, $8 shipping, standard 13.6% category. Final Value Fee 13.6% × $158 = $21.49, plus $0.30. Total fees $21.79. Net profit: $150 − $21.79 − $60 = $68.21 (45.5% margin).
• Amazon FBA: same $150 listing, $60 product cost, $3.00 inbound shipping, an $8.50 fulfillment fee (a larger item than Example 1), 15% referral fee. Referral fee $22.50, total fees $31.00. Net profit: $150 − $22.50 − $8.50 − $60 − $3 = $56.00 (37.3% margin).

Same ranking, similar percentage gaps — Etsy leads, eBay is competitive, Amazon trails on margin but likely wins on reach and delivery speed. One more wrinkle worth seeing: if this exact $150 Etsy sale had come through Offsite Ads instead (covered in full in Etsy Fees Explained), the 15% ad fee — charged on the full $158 order — adds $23.70 in fees, dropping net profit from $74.78 to $51.08 and margin to 34.1%. That single conditional fee is enough to drop Etsy from first place to behind eBay on this exact sale. The lesson isn't "avoid Offsite Ads" — it's that a platform's ranking in a comparison like this one can flip entirely based on details specific to your actual listing, which is exactly why re-running your own numbers matters more than memorizing which platform "wins" in an article.

The two examples above use round, tidy numbers on purpose, to make the math easy to follow. Real products rarely land on exact numbers like that, and small changes in any one input — your actual fulfillment fee, your shipping cost, your category's referral rate, whether Offsite Ads applies — can shift the ranking between platforms meaningfully, sometimes enough to reverse which one actually nets more.

This is the practical case for comparing platforms side by side instead of pricing a listing on just one and assuming it's representative. A single-platform fee calculator — including each of the three linked throughout this article — will give you an accurate number for that one platform, but it can't tell you, in the same view, what the identical listing would net somewhere else. You'd need to open three separate tools, enter the same inputs three times with each platform's slightly different field set, and do the comparison yourself by hand — which is exactly the friction most sellers skip, and exactly why most sellers never actually run this comparison before choosing where to list.

The Marketplace Fee Matrix exists specifically to remove that friction: enter your cost, price, and shipping once, and see net payout and true margin across Etsy, eBay, Amazon FBA, Poshmark, and Shopify side by side, sorted by whichever nets the most for your specific numbers — not the two hand-picked examples in this article, but your actual product. It's worth being direct about why this matters: the platform that wins on margin for a $35 handmade item is not guaranteed to be the same platform that wins for a $150 one, or for a product with a different shipping cost, or for a seller who's already crossed Etsy's Offsite Ads threshold. A one-time comparison, run with your real numbers, beats a rule of thumb every time.

None of this replaces the audience-fit judgment from earlier in this guide — the highest-margin platform for a product nobody on that platform is looking for still isn't the right choice. But once you've narrowed to platforms where your product genuinely fits, running the real fee math across all of them, rather than defaulting to whichever one you're already used to, is the difference between a pricing decision and a guess.