What Whatnot, Vinted and eBay sellers keep

Whatnot charges no listing fee. On a sale you pay a commission on the item price plus a payment processing fee on the whole order, with VAT added if you are not VAT registered.

Rates differ by category and by seller, and Whatnot runs time-limited offers, so use the rate in your own Seller Hub. Put that into the sum below before you price a show.

Vinted charges sellers nothing to list or sell. The buyer pays a Buyer Protection fee at checkout, a percentage of the price plus a fixed amount, and the buyer pays postage too. Your cost per sale is the packaging and anything you pay for optional extras such as Bumps.

eBay made selling free for UK private sellers, except motors, and now charges buyers a Buyer Protection fee on private sales instead. Business sellers pay a final value fee on the total including postage: 11.9% for most clothing and 10.9% for toys and collectables without a shop, plus 30p per order up to £10 or 40p above, and a 0.35% regulatory operating fee. If you sell often enough to count as trading, eBay expects you to register as a business seller.

Example, not a typical result. You buy a single card for £8 and it sells for £20 in a live auction. Take your commission and processing rates from Seller Hub, work both out on the £20, and add VAT if you are not registered.

Packaging from our product bands: a penny sleeve at about 1p, a 35pt toploader at 12p to 18p, a board-backed mailer at 15p to 24p and a thermal label at 3p to 5p. Call it 40p. What is left after fees and that 40p is your margin before time, and the buyer covers postage at checkout.

Example, not a typical result. You pay £4 for a knitted jumper at a charity shop and sell it for £15. Vinted takes no seller fee, and the buyer pays Buyer Protection and postage on top. A grey mailing bag from a 100 pack costs 8p to 13p.

You keep about £10.90. Time eats into that: washing, measuring, six photos, a listing, messages and a drop-off at an InPost locker, a Post Office or an Evri ParcelShop. If that takes 25 minutes, £10.90 works out at about £26 an hour. If you spent an hour hunting rails to find it, your rate halves.

Example, not a typical result. A boxed toy bought for £12 sells for £30 with £3.75 postage charged, the Royal Mail Tracked 48 small parcel price in our postage data. As a private seller you pay no eBay fee, so after a 56p to 88p small box and the label, you keep about £17.

As a business seller without a shop, the final value fee is 10.9% of £33.75, or £3.68, plus a 40p order fee and 12p regulatory fee. That's £4.20, leaving about £12.90. That gap of about £4 depends on which side of the trading line you sit.

Sourcing, cleaning, photos, listing, messages, packing and drop-off all count. Time a week of orders with your phone's stopwatch and divide your profit by the hours. Your hourly rate tells you more than your sales total.

Packing time is the easiest to cut. A thermal printer with 100 x 150 mm labels from a 250 roll, a postal scale and pre-folded mailers at arm's reach cut each parcel to a few minutes. One daily drop-off saves you three separate trips.