Picking a marketplace for your used goods

Most marketplace guides open with a long comparison and bury the fees at the bottom. I'm going to flip that. The table below pulls headline rates straight off each platform's own fee or help pages in September 2026, so the question almost everyone asks first (what does each platform actually take?) is answered up top.

Two things the table doesn't capture, worth knowing before you skim it. Cross-listing the same item to five marketplaces sounds efficient, but each platform rewards a slightly different listing, and once it sells in one place you have to pull it everywhere else before a second buyer pays for it. Headline rates also aren't the deciding factor on a given item: audience and item-fit move the take-home number more than the percentage gap between Mercari and eBay does. The rest of this guide is about getting both of those right.

Two caveats the table can't fit. First, every platform varies by category: on eBay, books and watches run higher than the headline rate and guitars run lower, and the same logic applies on every site that breaks fees out by department. Second, most platforms run promotional rates for new sellers, store subscribers, or specific categories at any given time. The headline numbers above are the right starting point, not the final math on your specific item.

Three questions tell you which row to pick

With the table in front of you, the rest is a short decision tree. Three questions get you most of the way.

1. Item shape. Heavy or bulky points to the local-pickup rows: Facebook Marketplace, OfferUp, Craigslist. Lightweight and shippable opens up the national tier.
2. Shipping next to the price. Look up what it would cost to ship (every carrier has a free calculator) and compare it to what the item will sell for. If shipping is a big chunk of the price, the buyer is paying close to double, and local usually makes more sense. If shipping is small next to the price, the national sites open up. Specialized or collectible items are the exception: the right buyer may be worth the shipping (see the category platforms below, and shipping without losing money).
3. Urgency. Need it gone this week points to local with aggressive pricing. Patient enough to hold for the right buyer points national, where the audience is bigger but the pace is slower.

What the table doesn't say

Fees are only one of three things the platform is selling. The second is buyer protection: every platform on the national-shipping rows handles disputes through its own system, and an honest listing plus tracked shipping is your best protection there. The third is audience: a specialty platform's 20% fee can still net more than a general platform's 10% or 13.6% if the audience there is specifically searching for the item by name.

The specialty fee can be the higher number and still leave you better off, when the buyer arrived looking for that kind of item. The right marketplace is more about who the audience is than which row of the fee table is cheapest.

For everyday clothing without a brand premium, the general platforms work fine and the lower fee wins. The specialty premium kicks in once the item has a label or a style that the audience is searching for.

What 10% vs 13.6% vs 20% actually costs you

Percentages collapse the picture; dollars sharpen it. The same item priced three ways, on three platforms, with the headline rates from the table above and shipping and sales tax set aside (eBay's percentage also applies to the shipping and tax the buyer pays, and Mercari's to buyer-paid shipping, so their real numbers run a little higher):

• A $25 item. Mercari takes a clean $2.50 (10%). eBay takes $3.80 (13.6% + $0.40). Poshmark takes $5 (20%; its $2.95 flat fee only applies under $15). The gap between cheapest and most expensive is $2.50, small enough that audience and item shape decide the call, not fees.
• A $75 item. Mercari takes $7.50. eBay takes $10.60. Poshmark takes $15. The $7.50 gap between Mercari and Poshmark is the audience premium in dollar terms; on a name-brand item it's usually paid back many times over by the higher clearing price.
• A $200 item. Mercari takes $20. eBay takes $27.60. Poshmark takes $40. The gap widens at higher prices, which is why expensive non-brand-premium items belong on the lower-fee platforms and expensive brand-premium items still belong on Poshmark.

Category-specific platforms worth knowing

Where you sell matters most when the item is specialized. A music store may see the value in an old violin that an interior designer at a flea market would walk past, and the same goes online: check the places built for that kind of item too, to get the best idea of where it belongs. Worth knowing:

• Vinyl records: Discogs (discogs.com), which is also the canonical music database, so the listing draws on a community-maintained record of pressings and editions.
• Musical instruments and gear: Reverb (reverb.com), a marketplace built for musical instruments and gear.
• Lego: BrickLink (bricklink.com), now owned by The Lego Group itself, with a parts-out model that can sometimes be worth more than the assembled set.
• Sports and trading cards: COMC (comc.com) for the scan-and-consign model; TCGplayer (tcgplayer.com) for trading-card games such as Magic, Pokémon, and Yu-Gi-Oh.
• Luxury handbags and authenticated designer: The RealReal (therealreal.com), which sells on consignment, and Fashionphile (fashionphile.com), which buys outright with an upfront offer. Both authenticate.
• Watches: Chrono24 (chrono24.com) for anything mechanical or above the under-$200 range; eBay is fine for fashion watches and quartz.

These platforms charge category-specific fees that aren't in the table above; check each one's seller-fee page before listing. The reason to use them isn't a lower fee. The reason is that the buyer who ends up on Discogs at 9pm looking for a specific 1973 pressing is not the same buyer who ends up on eBay searching for "vintage records."

A note on cross-listing tools

If you're holding more than ten or twenty items and the per-platform tuning starts to feel like a job, cross-listing services exist for exactly that problem. They post to several marketplaces from a single draft and pull the item everywhere once it sells, which is the double-sale problem solved; most also help tune titles and tags per platform.

These tools don't change which platform is right for an item; they just make it cheaper to be on more than one when the volume justifies it. For someone clearing a single closet, the right answer is usually still pick one platform and commit.

Paid ones charge a subscription. Free ones make their money some other way, so check what a free tool does with your listing data before you hand it a month of it.

Picking in 30 seconds

Read the table for the platforms you already know. Skim the row that fits the item shape, the shipping cost next to the price, and the urgency. Pick that platform. If you came in holding a specific item, you should leave with a clear answer for where to put it, not a comparison chart to puzzle through.

Once the platform is picked, the next step is the listing itself. What a listing needs to convert a buyer is the next read.