How to Work Out What You Really Keep After Selling Fees

Turn a platform's percentage and flat fees into one number, the money left from each sale, and the price you need to charge to keep the profit you planned.

Fees are a cost of every sale

Most online shops take a cut: a percentage of the price, a payment-processing percentage, and often a small flat amount per order. Each looks small. Together they can take well over a tenth of the price. Because they scale with the sale, treat them as a variable cost, the same as materials and postage.

Step 1: Find your fee rates

Open the fee page of each place you sell and write down three things: the percentage the platform takes, the payment percentage, and any flat fee per order. Rates change, so check them again every few months. The numbers below are made-up examples to show the sum, not any real platform's rates.

Example rates: 10% platform fee, 3% payment fee, plus $0.25 per order.

Step 2: Work out the fees on one sale

A candle sells for $30. Your costs for that sale are $8 of materials, $1 of packaging and $4 of postage you pay, so $13 in all.

Platform fee: 10% of $30 = $3.00
Payment fee: 3% of $30 = $0.90, plus $0.25 = $1.15
Total fees: $3.00 + $1.15 = $4.15

What you keep: $30 - $4.15 - $13 = $12.85. As a share of the price, that is $12.85 / $30 = 42.8%.

Without the fees you would have thought you kept $17 (56.7%). The fees took $4.15, which is 13.8% of the price.

Step 3: Find the price that protects your profit

If you want to keep $17 per sale after fees, you cannot just add $4.15 to the price, because the fees grow as the price grows. Use this instead:

Price = (costs + flat fee + profit you want) / (1 - total percentage fees)

Here: ($13 + $0.25 + $17) / (1 - 0.13) = $30.25 / 0.87 = $34.77.

Check it: 13% of $34.77 = $4.52, plus $0.25 = $4.77 in fees. $34.77 - $4.77 - $13 = $17.00. It works.

Step 4: Compare where you sell

Run the same sum for each place you sell. A site with lower fees may let you charge less, or keep more at the same price. A selling place with no fees but fewer visitors can still be the weaker choice, so compare what you keep per sale and how many sales each place brings.

Common mistakes

Forgetting the flat fee. On a $10 item, $0.25 is 2.5% on its own.
Ignoring fees on postage. Some platforms charge their percentage on the shipping the buyer pays too. Check your fee page.
Adding fees to the price the simple way. Adding $4.15 to $30 gives $34.15, which leaves you only $16.46 after fees. Use the division in Step 3.
Using old rates. Re-check them regularly.

Use the free selling fees calculator on this site to try your own rates. The Back Office Kit (for Microsoft Excel) keeps your orders in one place, so you can see what each sale brought in.

This was one sum

The Back Office Kit runs all of them, for every product, together.

One Excel workbook that prices your products, tracks your stock, logs your orders and builds your invoices and wholesale line sheet. One payment of $19. Download the moment you pay.

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The dashboard tab of the Back Office Kit: revenue, profit, cash, stock value and items to reorder.