Guides · Selling

TCGplayer fees explained — and the profit math most sellers skip

Every marketplace sale pays four tolls before you pocket anything: the marketplace commission, the transaction fee, postage, and supplies. Sellers who track only the sale price overestimate their profit every time — the size of the gap depends on the price of the card, and on cheap singles it can be the whole thing. Here is the arithmetic, with the rules as published for TCGplayer's US Marketplace (seller levels 1–4, standard listings — not Pro, Direct, or Sync), reviewed September 24, 2026.

The worked example

A $25.00 card, no buyer-paid shipping and no sales tax in this scenario. Commission is 10.75% of the item price plus any buyer-paid shipping: $2.69. The transaction fee is 2.5% of the item price plus buyer-paid shipping plus the sales tax the buyer paid, plus $0.30 per order: $0.92. That is $3.61 of fees and $21.39 of net proceeds. Ship it PWE-style with a sleeve, toploader, and stamp ($1.33), and on a card that cost you $12.00 the profit is $8.06 — not the $13 that sale-minus-cost suggests.

Two details decide whether your own arithmetic matches a statement. Buyer-paid shipping is revenue and fees apply to it, so charging for shipping is not free money. Sales tax collected from the buyer is not your revenue — the marketplace remits it — but it still sits in the transaction-fee base. And TCGplayer rounds fee cents half-even, so the $0.625 in this example becomes $0.62, not $0.63.

Run your own numbers in the free fee calculator — it covers eBay's schedule too, and gives you a break-even price. Both are estimates from published fee schedules for a single item in a single order; your settlement statements are the actual record.

The cheap-card trap

Percentage fees scale with price; the per-order fee, postage and supplies don't. Take the same shipping setup on a $2.00 card that cost you $0.50: $0.57 in fees plus $1.33 of postage and supplies is $1.90 of cost to move a $2.00 item — a -$0.40 result. Holding that shipping cost fixed, the card has to reach $2.45 just to break even, several times what you paid for it. Bulk sellers survive on batching, penny sleeves, and knowing exactly where that line sits per listing.

1099-K gross is not profit

If a marketplace issues you a Form 1099-K, the figure on it is gross payments— before commission, transaction fees, postage, supplies, refunds, and before what you paid for the cards. That gross figure does not by itself establish your taxable profit. The thresholds that decide whether a form is issued have changed over the years and can differ by platform and by state, so the presence or absence of a form tells you little; your obligation to report income doesn't depend on receiving one. The IRS explains the form at Understanding your Form 1099-K.

What that leaves you responsible for is documentation. Reconciling gross payments down to what you actually earned takes records of fees, shipping costs and cost basis — which is the awkward part for bulk lots, where per-card cost is derived rather than obvious, and easiest to capture at acquisition time rather than in April.

Fee rules above were reviewed against the marketplaces' published schedules on September 24, 2026 and cover standard US single-item orders only. Pro, Direct and Sync listings, other seller levels and programs, international orders, promotions and account-level adjustments are all out of scope. Marketplaces change terms; verify against the published fee schedule and treat every figure here as an estimate rather than a settlement. Not tax advice; talk to a professional about your situation.