Two charges come out of a Whatnot sale. They look similar on a statement and behave nothing alike, because they are calculated on different amounts. Getting that straight is most of the work.
US seller rates · checked 31 October 2026 against Whatnot's published fee schedule
Commission is the platform's cut. It is charged on the final sale price of the item. Shipping you charge the buyer is not part of that number, and neither is sales tax. A card that sells for $50 with $6 shipping is charged commission on $50, not $56.
The standard rate is 8.00%. Electronics run at 5.00%, coins and money at 4.00%, and sellers who move enough volume in a four-week window move down a tier. The lowest published tier is 6.50% at USD 500,000 across four weeks.
Processing is what it costs to move the money. It is charged on the buyer's total, which means item price plus shipping plus sales tax. In the US the rate is 2.9% + $0.30.
This is the charge that catches people. Sales tax is collected from the buyer and remitted by the platform. It never becomes your money. But it does sit inside the base this fee is calculated on, so a sale in a high-tax state costs you slightly more to process than the same sale in a low-tax state.
Add the headline numbers and you get 8% + 2.9% = 10.9%, plus thirty cents. That number is wrong the moment shipping or tax enters the picture, and it is wrong in both directions.
The table below is the same 8% seller, same item, with only shipping and tax changed. The last column is the total of both fees divided by what you were owed (item plus shipping).
| Item | Shipping | Tax | Commission | Processing | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $10.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.80 | $0.59 | 13.9% |
| $20.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $1.60 | $0.88 | 12.4% |
| $50.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $4.00 | $1.75 | 11.5% |
| $50.00 | $5.00 | $0.00 | $4.00 | $1.90 | 10.7% |
| $50.00 | $10.00 | $0.00 | $4.00 | $2.04 | 10.1% |
| $50.00 | $0.00 | $5.00 | $4.00 | $1.90 | 11.8% |
| $200.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $16.00 | $6.10 | 11.1% |
Three things fall out of that table, and all three are useful when you are deciding what to list.
Cheap items cost proportionally more. The $0.30 in the processing fee does not shrink with the sale. A $10 item gives up 13.9% while a $200 item gives up 11.1%. On low-value inventory, one sale at $10 is worse than half a sale at $20.
Charging shipping lowers your rate. Commission ignores shipping, so every dollar of shipping you pass to the buyer dilutes the commission without adding to it. That is why the same $50 item drops from 11.5% to 10.1% once $10 of shipping is added. It does not make shipping profitable, it just spreads the fixed commission thinner.
Tax raises your rate without paying you anything. Tax is not your income, but processing is charged on it. A $5 tax bill on that $50 item adds about fifteen cents of processing that comes out of your side. You cannot avoid it, but it explains why two sales at the same price land differently in different states.
The numbers above cover the two charges that come out of a completed sale. They do not include shipping labels you buy to fulfil the order, packaging, the cost of the inventory itself, or any money you spend promoting a show. Those are real costs and they are frequently larger than the platform's cut. The calculator on the home page has fields for them so you can see profit rather than just payout.
Every figure on this page was read from Whatnot's published seller fee schedule on 31 October 2026. Rates change without much notice, and categories occasionally run promotions that beat the standard table. Two habits keep you out of trouble:
Whatnot's own worked example matches the formula used here: a $50 item with a $58.70 total order value comes out to $4.00 commission and $2.00 processing. That is a good single check that the arithmetic is right before you trust it on a larger batch.