How to work out your real profit on eBay (UK, 2026)
eBay tells you what you sold. It does not know what your stock cost you, so it cannot tell you what you made. To work out real profit on an eBay sale you take what the buyer paid, then subtract eBay's fees, your postage, and what you originally paid your supplier. The number left over is the only one worth looking at.
This guide walks through that calculation the way a UK business seller actually has to do it, including the fees most people forget and the one figure eBay can never supply.
What is the formula for eBay profit?
Real profit on a single eBay order is:
Real profit = what the buyer paid − eBay's fees − postage − cost of goods − any refund
Four subtractions. Three of them eBay can show you. The fourth — cost of goods — it has no way of knowing, because you bought that stock somewhere else entirely.
That single gap is why most sellers cannot answer the question "which of my orders actually made money?" without sitting down with a spreadsheet.
What does eBay actually take from a UK sale?
This depends entirely on whether you sell as a private seller or a business seller, and the difference is large.
Private sellers
Since 1 October 2024, UK private sellers pay no final value fee, no per-order fee and no regulatory fee on ordinary domestic sales. eBay charges the buyer a Buyer Protection Fee instead. If you sell privately, your proceeds are essentially the full amount you listed.
Business sellers
Business sellers face a stack of four charges on every order:
| Charge | What it is |
|---|---|
| Final value fee | eBay's main commission, charged on the item plus the postage the buyer paid. Varies by category — roughly 6.9% on some tech up to around 14.9% on jewellery, with most everyday categories somewhere in the 9.9%–12.9% band. |
| Per-order fee | A fixed charge per order: around £0.30 on smaller orders, rising to about £0.40 once the order passes £10. |
| Regulatory operating fee | Roughly 0.35% of the total sale, covering eBay's compliance costs. |
| VAT on the fees | 20% added on top of all of the above. Reclaimable if you are VAT-registered on the standard scheme — but it still leaves your account first. |
eBay changes its fees, and it changed the per-order fee during 2026. Treat the figures above as the shape of the thing, not gospel, and confirm your own categories on eBay's official fee page before pricing anything.
The two most people forget
The final value fee gets all the attention. In practice two other things quietly eat margin:
- Fees are charged on postage too. If the buyer paid £3.95 postage, eBay's percentage applies to that as well, not just the item price.
- Selling internationally adds roughly 3% on top of everything else.
How do you calculate profit on a real order?
Take a straightforward example. You sell a kitchen item for £22.00 with £3.50 postage, as a business seller in a category with a 12.9% final value fee.
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Buyer paid (item + postage) | £25.50 |
| Final value fee at 12.9% | −£3.29 |
| Per-order fee | −£0.40 |
| Regulatory operating fee at 0.35% | −£0.09 |
| VAT at 20% on those fees | −£0.76 |
| Your postage label | −£3.10 |
| Cost of goods — what you paid your supplier | −£9.51 |
| Real profit | £8.35 |
A £25.50 sale that left you £8.35. Not bad — but notice that the sale price told you almost nothing useful on its own, and that the single largest deduction was the one eBay has no record of.
Why can't eBay just show me my profit?
Because eBay only sees one side of the trade.
It knows what the buyer paid and what it charged you. It has no idea that the item cost you £9.51 on Amazon three weeks earlier, because that purchase happened on a different platform, on a different day, under a different order number.
Seller Hub can show you sales, fees and payouts. It cannot show you margin, and no amount of digging through it will produce a figure it never had.
Why does the spreadsheet always break?
Nearly every growing seller builds one. It works for a while. Then:
- A supplier order arrives as a part shipment, split across two deliveries at different prices
- A supplier changes its price between one restock and the next, so which cost applies to which sale?
- A buyer returns an item and the refund lands weeks after the sale it relates to
- You buy ten of something and sell them across three months
The admin grows faster than the shop does. At some point the sheet quietly stops being updated, and the seller goes back to guessing.
This is the point at which a lot of people cap their own shop rather than grow it — not because sales dried up, but because the admin became unmanageable.
What is FIFO, and why does it matter here?
If you buy the same product more than once at different prices, you need a rule for which cost applies to which sale.
FIFO — first in, first out — assumes the oldest stock sells first. Buy ten at £4 and later ten at £6, and your first ten sales carry the £4 cost.
The alternative, a rolling average, blends everything into one number. It is simpler, and it hides things: a bad buy at a high price disappears into the average instead of showing up as the poor-margin batch it actually was.
For a reseller sourcing the same lines repeatedly, FIFO tells you which batch cost what. That is the difference between knowing a product is profitable and assuming it is.
What about VAT?
If you are not VAT-registered, nothing is deducted for VAT on your sales, and your profit figures are exactly as they appear.
If you are registered, three things change: VAT on your sales is not yours to keep, VAT on eBay's fees is generally reclaimable on the standard scheme, and the flat rate scheme works differently again. Registering part-way through a year also means orders before and after that date must be treated differently — which is exactly the sort of thing spreadsheets get wrong.
VAT treatment is a question for your accountant, not for a blog post. What matters for profit tracking is that your records can tell one period apart from another.
The honest answer most tools avoid
There is a difference between a figure that is complete and a figure that is confident.
If six of your forty-seven orders have no cost recorded against them, any profit total that includes those six is wrong — and quietly flattering, because a missing cost counts as zero, which makes an order look like pure profit.
The right behaviour is to flag it: six of forty-seven orders have no cost, not counted here. A number with a stated gap is far more useful than a number that silently pretends.
Working it out without a spreadsheet
The supplier cost does exist. It is sitting in the confirmation your supplier sent you when you bought the stock.
SellerControl captures that cost automatically, matches it to the eBay order the stock was sold on, and shows real profit per order — with anything missing a cost flagged rather than counted as zero. It was built by a working eBay seller who hit exactly the wall described above.
Frequently asked questions
How do I work out profit on an eBay sale?
Take what the buyer paid, including postage. Subtract eBay's fees, your postage label cost, what you paid your supplier, and any refund. What remains is your real profit.
Does eBay show my profit?
No. eBay shows sales, fees and payouts. It has no record of what you paid your supplier, so it cannot calculate profit.
Do eBay fees apply to postage?
Yes. For business sellers the final value fee is charged on the total the buyer paid, which includes the postage they were charged.
What is a good profit margin on eBay?
It varies by category and by how you source. The more useful question is whether you know your margin per order at all — most sellers who feel unsure are discovering that some lines lose money.
Do UK private sellers pay eBay fees?
Since 1 October 2024, UK private sellers pay no final value fee on ordinary domestic sales. eBay charges the buyer a Buyer Protection Fee instead. Business sellers still pay the full fee stack.