What Percentage Does Whatnot Take

What does Whatnot charge sellers?

Last updated: August 2026

Bottom line: about 8% commission plus payment processing near 2.9% and $0.30 per order — call it 11% all-in, so a $30 item nets roughly $26.40 before you pay for the shipping label. That's cheaper than eBay's 13.25% and dramatically cheaper than Poshmark's flat 20%.

The straightforward answer to what percentage does whatnot take is 8% commission, and the reason sellers still get surprised is the second line.

Payment processing is charged per order, and live selling produces a lot of small orders — sixty items across forty-five buyers in one show means forty-five separate $0.30 charges plus the percentage, which is a materially different bill than one large order would generate.

What that means per show

Work an $1,800 show. Commission at 8% is $144. Processing at roughly 2.9% plus $0.30 across 45 orders is about $65. Total platform cost is near $209, or 11.6% of gross. Then labels: 45 parcels at an average $6.20 is $279, which is larger than the platform's entire cut.

Sellers asking what percentage does whatnot take usually discover that postage, not commission, is the dominant line in their cost structure.

There's no subscription, no listing fee and no charge for running a show, which keeps the barrier to testing the format at essentially zero. You pay when items sell, and the fee comes out before the payout reaches your account rather than being invoiced separately.

Category matters at the margins. Rates have historically varied a little by vertical, and promotional arrangements for new categories or featured sellers come and go, so a figure quoted in a forum eighteen months ago may not describe your account today.

Check the current schedule in the app before building a pricing model on it — the 8% figure is a solid planning assumption rather than a permanent constant.

The comparison worth carrying is against your realistic alternative rather than against every platform at once. The same $30 item costs about $4.28 on eBay after fees and fixed charges, $6.00 on Poshmark, and roughly $3.60 here.

On sixty items a week that spread is real money — somewhere near $1,250 a year against Poshmark on identical inventory — which is the practical case for live selling even before the speed advantage is counted.

Full cost of an $1,800 show

Bottom line: platform charges run about $209 on an $1,800 show, shipping runs about $279, and cost of goods around $630 — leaving roughly $652 of contribution before your own time.

Read the two cost lines together and the priority becomes obvious. Anyone asking what percentage does whatnot take is looking at the $209; the $279 sitting underneath it is larger and far more controllable.

Combining orders for buyers who won multiple items is what keeps that figure from becoming $372 — fifteen combined orders saved roughly $93 on this single show, which is nearly half of what the platform charged.

Time belongs in the accounting too, even though it isn't a cash cost. That $585 of contribution takes roughly five hours all-in — two hours live, three across prep, packing and buyer messages — which works out near $117 an hour.

That's a healthy figure for resale work and it's the number worth tracking week to week, because it moves when any of the lines above move and it captures the trade-offs that a percentage never can. A show that grosses more but takes eight hours is not obviously better than one that grosses less in four.

Where the numbers move

Cost of goods is the line with the most variance and the most leverage. At 35% of gross the show contributes $585; at 50% it contributes $315, and at 25% it contributes $765.

Sourcing quality moves the outcome more than any fee schedule, which is why the answer to what percentage does whatnot take matters less to an experienced seller than what they paid for the pallet. , according to Federal Reserve economic indicators

Average sale price matters almost as much, because the $0.30 per-order charge and the fixed portion of a shipping label don't scale down. A show selling 60 items at $18 rather than $30 grosses $1,080 while incurring nearly identical shipping and processing costs — contribution falls by more than half.

Raising average price by curating better inventory is worth more than any percentage negotiation, and unlike the fee schedule, it's entirely within your own control from one show to the next.

Quick tangent — I use the Closo Demand Insights to track what is actually moving right now, which saves me about three hours a week of manual search. Worth a peek before your next haul.

What experienced sellers check before running the numbers

Bottom line: three inputs decide profitability far more than the commission — cost of goods as a share of sale price, average sale price, and how many orders you can combine — and each of them moves contribution by hundreds of dollars per show.

Cost of goods comes first because it dwarfs everything. At 35% of gross, an $1,800 show contributes about $585; at 50%, it contributes $315.

That $270 swing is larger than the entire platform charge for the night, which puts the question what percentage does whatnot take in its proper perspective — it's the fourth most important number in the equation, behind sourcing, average price and shipping.

Average price does quiet damage

The second input is average sale price, and it hurts in a way sellers rarely trace. Per-order costs — the fixed processing charge and most of a shipping label — don't shrink when the item is cheaper. Sixty items at $18 grosses $1,080 while incurring nearly the same $279 of postage and $65 of processing as sixty items at $30.

Contribution falls by more than half. A host who curates for a slightly higher price point rather than chasing bid velocity typically earns more from a smaller audience, which is counterintuitive until you watch the arithmetic.

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Batching by buyer at packing time and confirming the account handles combination automatically is a fifteen-minute setup that pays weekly.

Beyond those three, experienced sellers watch two things that don't appear in a fee comparison. Return rate, because a 4% rate on $1,800 is $72 of revenue plus unrecoverable outbound postage, and it climbs quickly when items are described loosely on camera.

And payout timing, since funds release after delivery and a weekly seller is perpetually a week behind — which requires roughly one show's revenue sitting idle as working capital before weekly sourcing starts to feel comfortable rather than tight.

One more input deserves attention because it's invisible in any spreadsheet: audience consistency. A host with 400 regular viewers sells the same inventory for more than a host with 40, simply because competitive bidding raises clearing prices.

The difference isn't small — the same box of cards or vintage tees can produce a 20% to 30% higher average when the room is full, and that premium flows straight to contribution because none of your costs changed.

Building that audience takes months of fixed scheduling and is the closest thing to a durable advantage available on the platform, far more so than any fee arrangement. Sellers comparing platforms on cost alone consistently underweight it, then conclude the economics don't work when what actually didn't work was an empty room on a Tuesday night.

Put together, the honest framing is that what percentage does whatnot take is a reasonable opening question and a poor stopping point. The platform's roughly 11% all-in is competitive with everything else in resale and it isn't negotiable.

What is negotiable, week to week, is what you paid for the goods, what you sell them for, how many parcels you consolidate, and how accurately you describe condition.

Sellers who fix those four earn well on this platform; sellers who focus on the fee schedule are spending their attention on the one line in the whole calculation they have no ability to change.

Common questions about the fees

Bottom line: no subscription, no listing charges, commission and processing deducted before payout, and shipping usually costing more than both combined., according to National Retail Federation research

Is there a fee to run a show?

No. Hosting costs nothing, listing costs nothing, and there's no monthly plan. You pay when items sell, which makes the format cheap to test — three or four shows cost you inventory and time but no platform spend at all.

Are fees deducted before or after I'm paid?

Before. The payout that reaches your bank is already net of commission and processing, so what you see arriving is close to what you keep before shipping labels. That's simpler than an invoiced model but it does mean your gross figure lives only in the reports, which matters at tax time.

Do buyers pay anything on top?

Buyers pay shipping and any applicable taxes at checkout, so their total exceeds your listed price. This affects bidding behavior — a buyer weighing a $30 item is really weighing $37 or so — and it's worth remembering when a show feels sluggish at a particular price point.

Does the rate change by category?

Rates have varied by vertical at times and promotional arrangements come and go, so check the current schedule in the app rather than trusting a figure from a forum post. The 8% commission is a reliable planning assumption, and anyone asking what percentage does whatnot take should verify it against their own recent payouts rather than any published summary.

What happens to fees when an order is refunded?

The commission generally follows the refund back, but the outbound label you already bought does not, and neither does the time spent handling it. On a $30 order that's roughly $6 of unrecoverable cost per return.

A host running a 4% return rate across 240 monthly items absorbs somewhere near $58 a month that never appears in any fee summary — a decent argument for describing condition carefully on camera rather than quickly.

How does this compare with selling the same items elsewhere?

On a $30 item: roughly $3.60 here, about $4.28 on eBay, and $6.00 on Poshmark. Across 240 items a month that spread is meaningful — nearly $600 a year against Poshmark alone. But the fee difference is smaller than the difference in how fast the inventory clears, which is the real reason to run shows.

So what percentage does whatnot take is worth knowing and rarely the deciding factor.

Work out your real cost per show

Bottom line: take your last show's gross, subtract 11.6% for platform charges, your actual label total and your cost of goods, then divide by hours worked — most hosts land between $90 and $130 an hour, and that number tells you far more than any fee percentage.

Run it on real figures rather than the illustration. Pull the payout report for your most recent show, add up the labels you actually bought, and estimate what the inventory cost you. On an $1,800 night with 35% cost of goods you should see roughly $585 of contribution across about five hours.

If your number is materially lower, the diagnosis is almost always cost of goods or too many separate parcels — not the commission, which is fixed and modest.

Then fix the two controllable lines

Combine orders for buyers who won multiple items; on the example show that's $93 saved in one evening. And walk your sourcing cost down: every point off cost of goods drops straight to contribution, so moving from 40% to 33% on an $1,800 show is $126 more in your pocket for identical effort.

Those two changes together are worth more than the entire platform charge, which is the practical reason knowing what percentage does whatnot take matters less than it feels like it should.

The Closo blog hub covers what surrounds this: sourcing economics for pallets and bulk lots, shipping cost control by weight and zone, live-selling inventory planning, and crosslisting workflows for the pieces that don't clear on a show. If your contribution per hour is thin despite full rooms, start with the sourcing material.

And the summary answer, one last time: what percentage does whatnot take comes to about 8% commission plus roughly 2.9% and $0.30 an order, near 11.6% all-in — competitive, non-negotiable, and the fourth most important number in your show's economics.