Why I built my own marketplace to escape eBay fees

I want to show you the spreadsheet cell that started all of this.

Last winter I sold a lot of electronics on eBay. The usual flipper rotation: estate sale finds, upgrades people abandoned, the occasional genuinely great score. One month I finally sat down and added up what I'd actually paid in fees. Between the final value fee (around 13.6% in my categories) and the per-order charge tacked onto every single sale, the platform had taken more money that month than I'd spent on inventory.

That's the part nobody says out loud. At typical marketplace rates, the platform is often your single biggest supplier cost. It beats your gas money. Some months it beats your sourcing.

The math that wouldn't leave me alone

Take a $100 sale. On eBay's standard rates you're keeping roughly $86 before you even buy a label. Poshmark takes a flat 20%, so $80.

And here's the detail that took me embarrassingly long to notice: the "final value fee" isn't calculated on your item price. It's calculated on the total the buyer pays, shipping included. If your buyer pays $10 for shipping, eBay takes its cut of that $10 too. That money was never yours. It exists to pay the carrier, and it passes through your hands for about a day, and they still take a percentage of it on the way by.

I kept coming back to the same thought. The actual service being provided here, hosting a listing, processing a payment, holding funds until delivery, none of it costs anywhere near 14%. Payment processing runs about 3%. The rest is just what happens when a market has one giant in it.

So I built the thing I kept wishing existed

Peddly charges a flat 8%, and 5% for your first 30 days. No listing fees, no subscription, and no fee on money that isn't yours. Your payout releases the moment your buyer confirms delivery, or automatically three days after the carrier marks it delivered. Buyer protection is real (14-day claim window), sellers verify their identity, and there's free sold-price data so you can price against what things actually sell for instead of guessing.

Is it small? Yes. Brand new? Extremely. Will you find rough edges? Almost certainly, and I fix them fast, usually the same day someone reports one. The bug report button goes straight to me because there is no one else it could go to.

But on that same $100 sale, you keep $92. Stack that difference across a year of steady flipping and it stops being a rounding error. It's a car payment.

If you're tired of doing the fee math too, see the full comparison or list something free and run the numbers on your own stuff.