Reselling Profit Statistics: What Flippers Really Make After Fees (2026 Data)

1 What Do eBay, Poshmark and Mercari Charge Sellers in 2026?

The headline percentages hide two things. The first is what the percentage applies to. eBay’s fee is charged on the total the buyer pays, shipping included, so a seller who charges for postage pays a fee on the postage too (eBay Help: Selling fees, 2026). Mercari’s fee is on the item price plus buyer-paid shipping as well, but it moved the rest of its old charges onto the buyer in January last year, which is why its seller rate looks low (Mercari Help: Fees on Mercari, 2026). Poshmark’s commission is the simplest and the steepest, but it includes a prepaid shipping label the buyer pays for, so the seller’s shipping cost is zero.

The second is the fixed part. eBay’s $0.40 per order and Poshmark’s $2.95 floor are small on a fifty-dollar item and large on a ten-dollar one. The next section shows what that does to margins, and it is the reason experienced flippers set a minimum sale price before they buy anything. The platforms are also not standing still: Mercari’s fee page was updated in late October (Mercari Help: Fees on Mercari, 2026), and the Reddit threads behind this article are full of sellers reacting to eBay’s promoted-listing changes. The rates here are the published rates on the research date, and the methodology says when they will be checked again. Fee schedules that change quietly are a theme across the platforms we cover, which is why our ClickBank review leads with the fees nobody lists.

2 How Much Profit Is Left on a Single Flip After Fees?

The tracked sale is worth reading line by line, because it is the only public breakdown of a real flip with every cost attached. The item cost ten dollars. Getting to the sale cost a share of an entry fee and petrol. eBay took seven dollars and change. The label cost six and a half, the packaging nearly two. What looked like a forty-five dollar profit was twenty-eight (Side Hustle Nation: The Real Costs of Reselling, 2026). That is still a healthy margin, just over half the sale price, and it is the kind of margin the Reddit threads behind this article keep returning to as the floor worth getting out of bed for.

Scale the sale down and the arithmetic turns against you. A twelve-dollar item on Poshmark loses a quarter of its price to the flat fee before anything ships (Poshmark Support: What are the fees for selling on Poshmark?, 2026), and on eBay the per-order fee pushes the platform’s cut to sixteen percent (eBay Help: Selling fees, 2026). Add a label and a mailer and there is often nothing left. This is why the resellers who post real numbers talk about minimum profit per item rather than margin percentage, and why our guide to side hustles that pay daily treats marketplace selling as slower and lumpier money than it looks.

Payment and cash-out charges are the last layer. Mercari’s Instant Pay costs $3 a transfer (Mercari Help: Fees on Mercari, 2026) while standard direct deposit is free, and the same trade-off between speed and cost runs through every platform on this site; our comparison of payment fees on a $1,000 invoice shows how much a few percent of processing adds up to over a year.

3 What Does eBay's Own Annual Report Say About the Market?

The take rate is the number to watch, because it is the platform’s margin on your margin. It rose from 13.77% to 13.94% in a year (eBay Inc. Form 10-K for 2025, 2024), and eBay’s filing attributes the revenue growth to higher volume, more first-party advertising and its shipping programme. Translated for sellers: more of the money moving through eBay is going to eBay, and a growing share of it is promoted-listing spend that sellers choose under pressure to be seen among 2.5 billion other listings (eBay Inc. Form 10-K for 2025, 2025).

The buyer figures cut the other way. 135 million active buyers and volume up seven percent mean demand is real and growing, and 51% of it comes from outside the United States (eBay Inc. Form 10-K for 2025, 2025), which is where eBay’s international shipping tools are aimed. For a part-time flipper the useful reading is that the market is not the problem; the cost of being visible in it is. eBay’s own operating margin of 20.5% (eBay Inc. Form 10-K for 2025, 2025) shows how well that model works for the company. Whether it works for the seller depends on the fee arithmetic in the sections above. The same squeeze is visible on the service marketplaces: our Fiverr review walks through what the platform takes from both sides of a gig, and our report on the gig platforms cutting guidance covers what happens to sellers when volume slows.

4 How Big Is the Resale Market, and Is It Still Growing?

These are forecasts from ThredUp’s annual report, produced by GlobalData, and they cover clothing rather than the electronics, collectibles and household goods that fill most flippers’ inventories. They still matter, because apparel is where the newest sellers start and where Poshmark, Depop and Mercari compete hardest. The report’s own framing is that supply, not demand, is the constraint: it values the opportunity in making selling easier at $23.3 billion (ThredUp 2026 Resale Report (press release), 2026), which is a polite way of saying most people who could sell their old clothes do not bother.

The discovery figure explains why the marketplaces are spending on promoted listings and social features. If nearly 50% of buyers find their next purchase through a feed or a creator (ThredUp 2026 Resale Report (press release), 2026), then being listed is no longer the same as being seen, and the fees in the first section are increasingly the price of admission rather than the price of a sale. A growing market with rising visibility costs is a reasonable description of reselling in 2026, and it is why the margin per item matters more than the market size.

5 What Does a Tracked Part-Time Reseller Actually Net?

This is one seller’s data, not a survey, and the article is careful to say so. Its value is the method: every cost assigned to the item it belonged to, including the share of petrol and entry fees for the trip that found it. Resellers who do that tend to discover the same thing, that sourcing is the lever. In this case a change of route raised monthly profit about 20% (Side Hustle Nation: The Real Costs of Reselling, 2026) without changing what was sold or where, because the cost of finding stock fell.

The hourly figure is the one to be honest about. It is an illustration in the source, not a measurement, and $7.50 (Side Hustle Nation: The Real Costs of Reselling, 2026) is below the federal minimum wage. Most part-time resellers never compute it because the hours are scattered across evenings and weekends. If you want to know whether flipping beats the alternatives on this site, that is the number to track for a month, in the same way our survey and user testing pay data measures those platforms by paid minutes rather than advertised rates.

Where this leaves a beginner is clear enough. Reselling has real demand, real margins on the right items and real costs the screenshots omit. Price every flip with the fee stack above, skip items whose fixed fees eat the spread, track your hours for a month, and compare the result with the capital-based income in our passive income statistics. Our review method applies the same test to every platform we cover: not what it says it pays, but what is left after the costs it does not mention.