Mercari fees explained: how much sellers actually keep

Selling fee = 10% × (item price + buyer-paid shipping)
Net payout  = (item price + buyer-paid shipping) × 0.90
            − shipping label you paid

A seller who lists a $45 jacket with $9 buyer-paid shipping keeps $39.60 of the buyer’s $54 — before counting what the jacket cost to source. Mercari currently has the simplest fee structure of the major US resale platforms: a single flat percentage, nothing else seller-side. That simplicity is recent, and the platform has already changed its mind about it once. This page walks the current structure, the payout math with a worked example, the free-shipping question, and cash-out options, with a live calculator inline.

One flat fee: 10%, effective January 6, 2025

Mercari’s entire seller-side fee schedule is one line:

Selling fee = 10% × (item price + buyer-paid shipping)

Three things are deliberately absent:

• No flat per-order fee. eBay adds $0.40 per order; Etsy adds $0.25. Mercari adds nothing, which matters most on cheap items, where flat fees eat the largest share of revenue.
• No separate payment-processing fee. Card processing is bundled into the 10%.
• No listing fee. Listing is free; you pay only when something sells.

The fee base includes buyer-paid shipping, so charging the buyer $9 for shipping costs you $0.90 of it in fees.

There is also a buyer-side fee worth knowing even though it never appears in your payout: buyers pay a 3.6% Buyer Protection fee on the item-plus-shipping subtotal, plus sales tax. On a $54 order that is $1.94, so the buyer actually pays $55.94 before tax. Combined, Mercari collects $5.40 from the seller and $1.94 from the buyer — $7.34, or 13.6% of the order, split across both sides. The buyer-side fee doesn’t reduce your payout, but it does raise the all-in price buyers compare against other platforms, which is worth remembering when you price.

The zero-fee year, briefly

In March 2024 Mercari eliminated seller fees entirely, shifting its take to buyer-side service and processing fees. The experiment lasted under a year: effective January 6, 2025, Mercari reinstated a 10% seller fee and replaced the buyer service fee with the smaller 3.6% Buyer Protection fee, which is the structure in force as of June 2026. The episode is a useful reminder that platform fee schedules are policy, not physics — check the effective date on any fee guide you read, including this one.

The payout math, worked

Two formulas cover everything:

Net payout = (item price + buyer-paid shipping) × 0.90 − label you paid
Net profit = net payout − item cost

Take the jacket: listed at $45, buyer pays $9 shipping, you buy the $9 label yourself, and the jacket cost $12 to source.

• Fee base: $45 + $9 = $54
• Selling fee: 10% × $54 = $5.40
• After the fee: $54 × 0.90 = $48.60
• Net payout (after the $9 label): $39.60
• Net profit (after the $12 cost): $27.60
• Margin on item price: 27.60 ÷ 45 = 61.3%
• ROI on cost: 27.60 ÷ 12 = 230%
• Breakeven item price: (9 + 12) ÷ 0.90 − 9 ≈ $14.33 — list below that with these costs and you lose money
• What the buyer paid: $54 + $1.94 Buyer Protection fee = $55.94 plus sales tax

Cash out with Instant Pay instead of free direct deposit and the $27.60 becomes $24.60.

Try your own numbers

Prefer the full page? The standalone Mercari fee calculator runs the same math. Two experiments worth running:

• Set the item price to the breakeven figure — net profit should land at zero. A useful sanity check, and a floor for your offer-accepting.
• Move $9 from buyer-paid shipping into the item price — the net payout doesn’t change. The next section explains why.

Free shipping: eat the label or charge the buyer?

Because the 10% applies equally to item price and buyer-paid shipping, free shipping on Mercari is fee-neutral — unlike platforms where fees hit only the item price.

• Listing A: $45 item + $9 buyer-paid shipping → ($45 + $9) × 0.90 − $9 label = $39.60 net payout
• Listing B: $54 item, free shipping → $54 × 0.90 − $9 label = $39.60 net payout

Identical, and the buyer’s all-in total is identical too ($55.94 before tax either way). So the free-shipping decision is purely about merchandising — free-shipping listings convert better and survive buyer filters — not about fees.

The mistake is offering free shipping without repricing. Keep the jacket at $45 with free shipping and the net payout falls to $45 × 0.90 − $9 = $31.50, a drop of $8.10 — 90 cents of every shipping dollar you stopped collecting. The rule of thumb: every $1 of label cost you absorb needs about $1.11 of item price to claw back, because each extra price dollar reaches you as 90 cents.

Cashing out: direct deposit vs Instant Pay

Once a sale completes, your balance sits in Mercari until you move it. As of June 2026 there are two routes:

• Direct deposit (ACH): free, typically a few business days.
• Instant Pay: a flat $3 per cash-out for near-immediate transfer to a debit card.

On the $27.60 profit above, Instant Pay is an 11% haircut on the profit of that single sale. The $3 is per cash-out, not per sale — batching several sales into one transfer dilutes it, and on any balance under about $100 the free ACH route is hard to argue against unless you genuinely need the money today.

How Mercari compares

Headline seller-side rates on the other major platforms, as of June 2026 — note the fee bases differ, so the percentages aren’t directly comparable:

• Mercari: 10% of item + buyer-paid shipping. Nothing else.
• eBay: ~13.25% of item + shipping + sales tax, plus $0.40 per order — run yours through the eBay profit calculator.
• Etsy: 6.5% transaction fee plus 3% + $0.25 payment processing plus $0.20 listing — stacked in the Etsy fee calculator.
• Poshmark: 20% of the item price at $15 and up, $2.95 flat below — see the Poshmark fee calculator.

Mercari’s flat 10% with no per-order fee makes it comparatively strong on low-priced items, where eBay’s and Etsy’s flat components bite hardest. The buyer’s 3.6% fee partially offsets that advantage at the checkout screen, since buyers see the all-in price.

Go deeper:

• Mercari fee calculator — the standalone version of the calculator above, with the full fee breakdown.
• eBay profit margin: the fees most resellers miss — the same ledger discipline applied to eBay, including time cost and returns.
• Etsy fee calculator and Poshmark fee calculator — for cross-listing the same item and comparing nets.

Educational content, not financial or tax advice. Mercari fee figures reflect the structure effective January 6, 2025, confirmed as of June 2026; platforms change fee schedules, so verify against Mercari’s current help pages before relying on the numbers. Reselling income is taxable.