Doubling what you paid for an item is a habit, not a pricing method. It ignores the label, the packaging and the two fees, and it tends to be wrong by ten or fifteen points in either direction. Working backward from the profit you want is only slightly harder and it stops the guesswork.
US seller rates · commission 8% · processing 2.9% + $0.30 · checked 31 October 2026
Before a sale pays you anything, it covers four things:
Only after all four is the rest profit. Most sellers price off the first one and skip the rest, which is why a sale that felt good on the stream can leave nothing behind.
Start from the number you want to keep. Let x be the list price, s the shipping you charge the buyer, C your total cost including label and packaging, and P the profit you want. At the standard 8% commission the relationship works out to:
The 0.891 is what is left of each dollar after 8% commission and 2.9% processing. The 0.30 is the fixed part of the processing fee, which is why cheap items behave worse than expensive ones.
If that formula is more than you want to think about mid-show, the calculator on the home page does the same arithmetic, including profit and margin. Three worked examples of what it produces:
Item cost $30, label $5, so C = $35. You charge the buyer $5 shipping, so s = 5. You want $20 profit.
List at $56.62. Commission is $4.53 and processing $2.09, leaving $55.00 of payout against $35 of cost: $20.00 profit, a 35% margin on cost.
Same item, but set profit to zero. This is your break-even list price, and it is the number worth writing on the box.
x = (0 + 35 + 0.30 + 0.145 − 5) ÷ 0.891 = $34.17Sell it for less than $34.17 and you have worked for free and paid the platform for the privilege.
Item cost $100, label $8, C = $108, buyer pays $8 shipping, target profit $50.
List at $168.95 and the sale pays out $158.00 against $108 of cost. The thirty-cent fixed charge barely registers at this price. On the $10 item in the fee table it is three full percentage points of the rate, which is why low-value lots behave so differently from high-value ones.
For goods where you ship at cost and the buyer pays shipping, listing at 1.5× your total cost lands around a third of cost in profit. On the $35 item above that is $52.50, which keeps roughly $11.50 after fees. Listing at 1.75× keeps about 55% of cost. Anything under 1.3× leaves less than a fifth of your cost as profit, which one return wipes out.
Treat that as a sanity check, not a rule. It drifts once shipping is free to the buyer, because free shipping means you are absorbing a cost the formula assumed you were passing on.
Prices get decided live, under time pressure, in front of an audience. That is the worst possible moment to do arithmetic, and it is the moment most sellers do it.
The habit that fixes this is a floor price written down before you go live: the break-even number from Example 2, rounded up a little, kept next to the item. During the show you only compare the current bid against a number that already exists. No calculation, no improvisation, no selling a $35 cost item for $30 because the room went quiet.
It also removes the awkward pause. Saying “this one starts at thirty-five” is faster and sounds more confident than stalling to work out what you can afford to take.