The same $50 jacket pays you $40 on Poshmark and $45 on Mercari. Nothing about the jacket changed. Nothing about the buyer changed. The only difference is which app you happened to open, and over a closet’s worth of listings that difference is the price of a decent holiday gift. Most people pick a resale platform the way they pick a checkout line, by guessing. Marketplace selling fees are published, fixed, and knowable before you take a single photo, which makes this one of the rare money decisions where the right answer is just arithmetic.
The biggest audience is not the biggest paycheck
Every “where should I sell my stuff” article ranks platforms by how many people shop there. That is the wrong ranking. Audience size affects how fast something sells, not how much of the sale price reaches your bank account, and for a fall cleanout the speed premium is worth far less than people assume. A sweater sitting in a closet for three extra weeks costs you nothing.
What it does cost you is the commission. Poshmark takes a flat $2.95 on items under $15 and 20 percent of everything at $15 and above, per its own seller fee page. Mercari charges a flat 10 percent of the item price, having folded its old separate payment processing charge into that single number and moved a 3.6 percent Buyer Protection fee onto the buyer instead. eBay runs a final value fee that varies by category, from 2.5 percent up to 15.3 percent, plus a per order fee of $0.30 on orders of $10 or less and $0.40 above that. Clothing lands around 13.6 percent.
Run the jacket through all three. Poshmark takes $10.00 and sends you $40.00. Mercari takes $5.00 and sends you $45.00. eBay takes 13.6 percent of $50, which is $6.80, plus the $0.40 order fee, for $7.20 total, and sends you $42.80. Same jacket, same week, a $5 spread between the best and worst outcome. That is 12.5 percent more money for choosing differently.
Now scale it, because nobody cleans out one jacket. Twelve items averaging $50 gets you $480 through Poshmark and $540 through Mercari. Sixty dollars, for the same photographs and the same shipping trips. I have watched people spend a full Saturday on listings and then hand a fifth of the proceeds to the platform that happened to be on their home screen.
Marketplace selling fees are three numbers, not one
The headline percentage is the number everybody compares, and it is the least useful of the three. What actually determines your payout is the commission rate, the per order flat fee, and who pays for shipping. Miss any one of them and your estimate is wrong.
The flat fee matters most at the bottom of the price range, which is where most closet cleanouts actually live. A $12 item on Poshmark costs you $2.95, or about 25 percent. The same $12 item on Mercari costs $1.20. On eBay it costs roughly $1.63 plus the $0.40 order fee, call it $2.03. The percentages people quote at each other are for $50 items, and almost nothing in the average donation bag is a $50 item.
The per order fee is small and constant, which means it is nearly invisible on a $200 sale and genuinely annoying on a $9 one. If you are selling a stack of paperbacks or kids’ clothes, bundle them. Three shirts in one listing at $30 pays one order fee instead of three, and you make one trip to the post office instead of three.
Shipping is where the math actually flips
This is the part the platform comparison articles skip, and it is the part that reverses the answer more often than anything else. Poshmark’s model puts a flat shipping label on the buyer, which is why its 20 percent commission is not as brutal as it sounds: your $40 is genuinely $40, with no postage coming out of it. On Mercari and eBay you choose, and sellers routinely offer free shipping because listings with free shipping sell faster.
Offer free shipping on that $50 jacket through Mercari and a $9 label turns your $45 into $36. That is now the worst outcome of the three, from the platform with the lowest fee. The 10 percent commission was never the deciding factor. The label was.
There is a fourth option that no fee schedule covers: selling it locally for cash or a peer-to-peer transfer, where the commission is zero and the shipping is zero. On a $50 jacket that is $50, a full 25 percent more than the Poshmark outcome and 39 percent more than the free-shipping Mercari outcome. The cost is that you have to be home when someone comes to get it, and you have to be willing to have a stranger meet you in a parking lot. For bulky, heavy, low-value things, furniture, exercise equipment, a car seat, strollers, that tradeoff is not close. Shipping a $60 item that weighs 30 pounds is how people discover they have paid for the privilege of decluttering.
The tax paperwork that scared you off in 2024 is gone for 2026
A lot of people quit selling online during the stretch when the 1099-K reporting threshold was headed toward $600 and every marketplace was emailing warnings about it. That worry is over for now. The IRS has confirmed that the One Big Beautiful Bill retroactively restored the pre-2021 threshold, so a payment platform is not required to issue you a Form 1099-K unless your gross payments exceed $20,000 and your transaction count exceeds 200.
Read that as paperwork relief, not a tax holiday. The IRS is explicit that the reporting threshold does not change what you owe, and all income from selling goods or services is still reportable. In practice, selling personal items for less than you paid for them produces no taxable gain anyway, which describes essentially every used sweater in America. Keep a note of what you sold and roughly what it cost you, and the question resolves itself.
There is a second reason this fall is a decent time to bother. GlobalData’s research for ThredUp’s 2026 resale report found U.S. resale growing nearly four times faster than the broader clothing retail market in 2025, on the way to a projected $78.8 billion U.S. secondhand apparel market by 2030. More useful than the size number is the report’s conclusion about what limits the market: supply, not demand. Translated out of industry language, that means there are more people trying to buy a used winter coat right now than there are people bothering to list one, which is a seller’s problem to have.
Price for the fee, not for the app
Pull out ten to fifteen things you know you will not use this winter and check what identical items actually sold for, not what they are listed for. Listed prices are wishes. Sold prices are data, and every one of these platforms lets you filter for them.
Then work backward from your target payout. If you want $45 in hand, you list at $50 on Mercari with buyer-paid shipping, at $56 on Poshmark, or at $53 on eBay. Setting the same price everywhere is how you end up netting three different amounts and never noticing.
Send the small stuff, anything under about $15, to whichever platform charges a percentage rather than a flat fee. Send the bulky stuff to a local buyer. Send everything in the middle to the lowest-commission platform that will let the buyer carry the postage. Then take the proceeds and move them straight into the account you are using for December, before they quietly become a coffee habit. If you have not set that account up yet, our holiday sinking fund guide covers where to park it, and auditing last December’s bank statement will tell you how much you actually need.
Nobody is hiding marketplace selling fees from you. All three schedules are one click from the listing screen, posted in plain numbers, and almost nobody opens them. Ten minutes of reading before you photograph anything is worth roughly $5 an item, which is a better hourly rate than most of the side hustles people are pitched in October.
