What eBay fees really cost you on a card sale

eBay is where the buyers are - and that audience has a price. If you don’t build the fee into your number before you list, you’re quietly handing back a chunk of every sale. Here’s exactly what eBay takes on a card, in plain numbers, so you can price around it instead of being surprised by it.

The two fees on every card sale

For trading cards in the US, eBay’s standard cut comes in two parts (figures current as of June 2026):

• Final value fee - 13.25% of the total sale on the portion up to $7,500 per item, then 2.35% on anything above that. Almost no card sale crosses $7,500, so for most of us it’s a flat 13.25%.
• Per-order fee - $0.40 for orders over $10, or $0.30 for orders of $10 or less. This is a flat add-on, once per order.

The detail that trips people up: the percentage is charged on the total the buyer pays - that includes the shipping you charge and any sales tax eBay collects, not just the card price. Charge $5 shipping and eBay’s fee is calculated on the card plus that $5.

What that looks like on a real card

Take a clean $50 single with free shipping built into the price:

TCGPursuit applies this same math to every sale automatically, so your profit numbers are net of fees instead of optimistic.

So a $50 card nets about $43 before you’ve paid for the toploader, the shipping label, and the card itself. That’s the real starting point - and it’s why pricing off the sticker number alone quietly eats your margin.

Promoted Listings: optional, but it stacks

Promoted Listings Standard lets you boost a card’s visibility for an ad rate you choose, and you only pay it if the card sells through the ad. The catch is that it stacks on top of the fees above. Set a 5% ad rate on that $50 card and you’re now paying roughly 13.25% + 5% + the per-order fee - call it a quarter of the sale gone. Promotion can absolutely be worth it in a crowded category, but treat the ad rate as part of your fee math, not a freebie.

A couple of extras to know

• International sales add a small fee (around 1.65%) when the buyer is outside the US. Worth it for the wider audience, but factor it in on thin-margin cards.
• High-value cards get a break right now. As of mid-2026 eBay is running a temporary promotion that cuts the final value fee in half on qualifying trading cards selling at $1,000 and up, graded or raw. If you move big cards, check whether your category qualifies before you list.

How to price around the cut

None of this means eBay is a bad deal - it’s the biggest pool of card buyers on the planet, and that reach is what the 13.25% buys. The sellers who do well just bake the fee in from the start. Work backward from the take-home you want: if you need $43 in your pocket, the card has to list around $50, not $46. Do that on every card and the fees stop being a surprise and become just another line in the math.