eBay VS Amazon – Which one is CHEAPER?

Quite often online you’ll see people saying how “it’s cheaper to sell on Amazon vs eBay”… but is this really true?

Well that’s what we’re going to find out today, to put this claim to rest one way or another!

But rather that just list all the fees for selling on eBay and Amazon in a boring table, instead we’re going to take a few examples and go through them one by one. That way we’ll get an easy to compare head to head battle between eBay and Amazon!

Before we get started with that, I also want to quickly go over the fee structure for selling on Amazon, as it differs slightly from eBay, and I know that this can sometimes cause confusion for new sellers.

So as most of you will already know, when selling on eBay you’ll pay the following fees:

Insertion Fee

This is the fee paid to start your listing. The exact amount depends on your shop subscription, how many listings you create each month, and whether it’s an auction or buy it now listing, but the most you’ll pay for an insertion fee is £0.26 per listing.

Final Value Fee

This is the fee you pay when your item sells, calculated as a percentage of the total transaction amount (including shipping). Depending on the category, the final value fee ranges from 5% to 11%.

PayPal Fee

Lastly, there is the PayPal fee, which is 3.4% + £0.20 (again calculated on the total transaction amount, including shipping).

Now let’s take a look at Amazon’s fee structure and how it compares to eBay:

First things first – Amazon offer two different pricing plans, depending on your volume of sales – the Basic (sell a little) plan and the Pro (sell a lot) plan. As the Pro pricing plan is better value if you sell 34 or more items per month, that’s the one we’ll be using for our comparison today.

So with that in mind, these are the fees you’ll pay when selling on Amazon:

Monthly Subscription Fee

With the Pro selling plan you pay a monthly subscription fee of £25, rather than a Per-Item listing fee.

Referral Fee

Next is what Amazon call the “referral fee” and this is your main fee when selling on Amazon. Comparable to the final value fee on eBay, it is charged as a percentage of the total amount paid for an item. This ranges from 7% to 25%. There is actually one category on Amazon that generates a whopping 45% referral fee, but this is specifically for Amazon device accessories, so we’ll ignore that.

Variable Closing Fee

Lastly for Amazon we have the variable closing fee. This is a set amount, depending on where the item was sold to, BUT it only applies to Books, Music, Videos, and DVDs – so for the vast majority of items sold on Amazon this won’t be applicable. The variable closing fee ranges from £0.14 to £1.32.

Alright, so now that’s out of the way and you know how the selling fees work on Amazon and eBay, let’s do our first comparison!

I’m going to start us off with a simple item, a Blu-ray movie.

We’ll be using a selling price of £7 (with free shipping).

eBay:

• Insertion Fee – £0.26 (this is for a buy it now listing)
• Final Value Fee – £0.56 (8% for DVD, Films& TV)
• PayPal Fee – £0.44

Total Fees – £1.26 (18% of selling price)

Amazon:

• Monthly Subscription Fee – £0.50 (£25 / 50 items sold per month)
• Referral Fee – £1.05 (15% for Books, Music, Videos, DVDs)
• Variable Closing Fee – £0.14 (for UK Standard Delivery)

Total Fees – £1.69 (24% of selling price)

Round 1 – Winner = EBAY!

So for our first comparison eBay is the winner, with total fees 25% less than selling on Amazon!

Our next comparison item will be a baby doll, selling for £35 (including shipping).

eBay:

• Insertion Fee – £0.26
• Final Value Fee – £3.15 (9% for Dolls & Bears)
• PayPal Fee – £1.39

Total Fees – £4.80 (14% of selling price)

Amazon:

• Monthly Subscription Fee – £0.50 (£25 / 50 items sold per month)
• Referral Fee – £5.25 (15% for Everything Else)

Total Fees – £5.75 (16% of selling price)

Round 2 – Winner = EBAY!

Although there was no variable closing fee for selling on Amazon for item no. 2, eBay still came out on top with total fees roughly 17% less than Amazon.

So far eBay has won both rounds fairly comfortably… let’s see how round 3 goes.

For our third comparison, the item being sold is a desktop computer. We’ll use a selling price of £160.

eBay:

• Insertion Fee – £0.26
• Final Value Fee – £8 (5% for Computers, Tablets & Networking > Desktops & All in Ones)
• PayPal Fee – £5.64

Total Fees – £13.90 (9% of selling price)

Amazon:

• Monthly Subscription Fee – £0.50 (£25 / 50 items sold per month)
• Referral Fee – £11.20 (7% for Computers)

Total Fees – £11.70 (7% of selling price)

Round 3 – Winner = AMAZON!

And Amazon takes round 3! This was mainly due to the lack of PayPal fees, which accounted for a large proportion of the eBay fees. Overall, Amazon was about 16% cheaper.

And for our final round, I want to use a jewellery set as our comparison item, with a selling price of £15.

eBay:

• Insertion Fee – £0.26
• Final Value Fee – £1.65 (11% for Jewellery and Watches)
• PayPal Fee – £0.71

Total Fees – £2.62 (18% of selling price)

Amazon:

• Monthly Subscription Fee – £0.50 (£25 / 50 items sold per month)
• Referral Fee – £3.75 (25% for Jewellery)

Total Fees – £4.25 (28% of selling price)

Round 4 – Winner = EBAY!

And the final round is a clear win for eBay, with the total fees being 38% less than Amazon!

I actually chose jewellery for the last round on purpose, as I wanted to demonstrate how eBay is a lot more consistent with their fees compared to Amazon, which can have a very large variation depending on the product.

If you take a look at eBay’s final value fees, you can see that the majority of items fall between 8% and 11%, with a few specific sub-categories being slightly less at 5% – 6%:

Compare that to Amazon where the range is from 7% all the way up to 25% (once again, ignoring Amazon Device Accessories):

What this means is that, while with eBay it’s okay to use a general figure when doing initial product research, with Amazon you really need to know exactly what the selling fees are before you start looking at specific products.

Overall, eBay won 3 out of 4 rounds, which means that we can safely say that the “Amazon is cheaper myth” is generally untrue.

But of course it’s not a case of one or the other!

Quite the opposite in fact – I talk often about how you need to expand to multiple selling channels, not only to further your potential customer base, but also to mitigate the risk of being fully dependant on a single selling channel (especially when it’s a third party platform!).

You can read more about my thoughts on this topic here: eBay vs Amazon vs Ecommerce Store.

That’s about it for today’s article. I hope you found it interesting and it gave you something to think about if you only sell on eBay or Amazon.

If there are any other common myths or sayings that you often hear spouted by the “online gurus” then let me know about it in the comments section below and I might do a future post exploring and testing the idea – to see if there’s any truth to it or it’s just the usual misinformation.

It could even become a new post series for this blog – a mythbusters for online selling! 😉

Until next time!

All the best,
Andrew