Whatnot publishes its seller fees in one sentence: 8% commission plus a 2.9% + $0.30 payment processing fee. That sentence is accurate, and two details behind it change your margin: what each fee is charged on. Most spreadsheets get at least one of them wrong.
Here is what each fee is charged on, with worked examples.
Fee 1: Commission, 8% of the item price
Commission is 8% of the price the buyer paid for the item. Shipping is not included. If a coupon applied, commission is charged on the discounted price, not the original.
- $25.00 item → $2.00 commission
- $58.00 item with a $5 coupon → $4.24 commission (8% of $53.00)
On the report, this is COMMISSION_FEE. It is 8.0% of POST_COUPON_PRICE; promotional periods and rounding can move an individual row by a cent or two.
Fee 2: Payment processing, 2.9% of the buyer’s total + $0.30
This is the one people miss. Processing is 2.9% of everything the buyer paid, item price plus shipping, plus a flat $0.30 per order. Buyer-paid shipping never reaches you (it goes toward the label), but you pay processing on it.
- $25.00 item + $6.99 shipping → 2.9% × $31.99 + $0.30 = $1.23
- The same $25 item with free shipping → 2.9% × $25.00 + $0.30 = $1.03
Twenty cents on one order. Across a year of orders it is real money, and it means cheap items with expensive shipping carry a higher effective fee rate than the headline suggests. On the report this is PAYMENT_PROCESSING_FEE, computed on the buyer’s total.
What that does to a typical order
| $25 item, $6.99 shipping | |
|---|---|
| Item price | $25.00 |
| Commission (8%) | −$2.00 |
| Processing (2.9% of $31.99 + $0.30) | −$1.23 |
| Your payout | $21.77 |
| Effective fee rate on the item | 12.9% |
The payout is the TRANSACTION_AMOUNT column in your CSV. It is already net of both fees. If you subtract them again in a spreadsheet, you are charging yourself twice. (We wrote a whole post about that mistake.)
Try your own numbers in the Whatnot Fee Calculator.
Fees you don’t see in the headline
- Tax on fees. In some states, sales tax is charged on the commission and processing fees themselves. It appears as
TAX_ON_COMMISSION_FEEandTAX_ON_PAYMENT_PROCESSING_FEE, and it is deducted from your payout. Usually cents per order. - Giveaway shipping. When you give an item away, Whatnot charges you the shipping label. It shows up as a row with
BUY_FORMAT = GIVEAWAYand a small negative amount. That is the real cost of a giveaway. The item’s value on top is your call. - Shipping adjustments. Occasionally a row of type
SHIPPING_CHARGEappears with a negative amount: a correction on a label. Easy to miss, because it has no listing attached.
What refunds do
A refunded order shows up as a negative row. Whether fees come back depends on the situation and Whatnot’s current policy, so we don’t model it as a rule. Read the row; it tells you what was returned.
The fee rate you should actually track
Not 8%, not 10.9%, but your effective rate: total fees ÷ total item sales for a period. Across two years of sample data it came to 12.6%. Yours depends on your average item price and how much shipping buyers pay: the lower the price, the more that $0.30 and the shipping component bite.
MARGN.PLUS computes it for you from the weekly report (gross sales, each fee, payout, and net after your cost of goods) and shows you where the rate is drifting. But you can do it in a spreadsheet in five minutes with the definitions above. The important part is using the right ones.
MARGN.PLUS is independent and not affiliated with Whatnot, Inc. Whatnot is a trademark of Whatnot, Inc. Fee behavior reflects US weekly earnings reports observed through 2026; Whatnot can change its schedule at any time, so confirm against your own statements.
