Every time a card changes hands on a marketplace, somebody else takes a cut.
That somebody is usually eBay. And the cut is not small.
When I sat down with my sons to plan how this store would work, the first question wasn’t what cards do we list? It was where do we list them? Every serious conversation about selling cards in 2026 starts with the same three choices — eBay, Whatnot, or your own site — and every one of them has a different answer to the question who keeps the money?
Here’s the math we did. Here’s the reasoning that came after it.
The numbers
As of April 2026, here’s what a marketplace costs on a typical single-card sale.
eBay charges a Final Value Fee on sports cards — about 13.25% of the sale price, plus $0.40 per order, when the item is in the Trading Cards category. Payment processing is included in that number because eBay processes payments directly through Managed Payments. (Confidence: High on the 13.25% headline rate; Medium on the per-order surcharge — marketplace fee pages change quarterly. Always verify at sellers.ebay.com before you commit.)
Whatnot charges an 8% seller fee on top of a 2.9% + $0.30 payment processing fee. Sales over $1,500 drop the 8% seller fee to 0% — a structure designed to pull high-end consignment onto the platform. (Confidence: High on the base structure; Medium on the $1,500 break point, which has shifted historically.)
Your own site (WooCommerce on WordPress.com, in our case) charges payment processing only — roughly 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction through Stripe or PayPal — plus a fixed platform subscription. No percentage of the card. No per-item tax.
Put numbers on it. Here’s what a $1,000 card looks like:
| Channel | Platform cut | Payment processing | Net to seller |
|---|---|---|---|
| eBay | ~$132.90 (13.25% + $0.40) | included | ~$867 |
| Whatnot (under $1,500) | $80 (8%) | $29.30 (2.9% + $0.30) | ~$891 |
| Own site (Woo + Stripe) | $0 | $29.30 (2.9% + $0.30) | ~$971 |
On a $1,000 sale, we keep about $104 more running our own store versus eBay. Over a hundred sales — a year of activity, maybe — that’s more than $10,000 in fees we decided weren’t worth paying.
That math alone isn’t why we built this. But it’s where the conversation started.
What we’d buy with $10,000 in kept fees
This is the part most sellers never work out explicitly, so I’m going to.
A store that keeps its own fees instead of paying a marketplace has four things to invest in that a marketplace seller cannot:
- Email list. Every buyer on our site gives us an email. Every email is a person we can tell about a new drop — for free, forever. On eBay, the customer belongs to eBay. They don’t get your email. You don’t get theirs. They buy again only if eBay shows them your listing next time.
- Returning-buyer discount. Loyalty works. A small “thank you” credit on a second purchase costs us nothing but the fees we’d otherwise be paying. It literally cannot exist on a marketplace because there’s no persistent customer relationship to reward.
- Editorial real estate. This page you’re reading. The About page where I tell the story of how we got here. The /verify page that walks you through looking up any PSA cert. None of that lives on an eBay listing. All of it compounds in Google and makes the next card easier to sell.
- Owned SEO. Our URLs rank for what our URLs rank for — permanently. An eBay listing ends when the card sells. Our product pages live on, teach search engines what we are, and keep pulling traffic for the category long after a specific card is gone.
What we lose by not being on eBay
I want to be honest about the trade.
Discovery. eBay has traffic we don’t. A buyer searching “Wembanyama PSA 10 superfractor” on eBay finds 40 listings. On Google, they find us eventually, after a year of content, after Google trusts the domain. That year is the cost of building our own asset.
Trust-by-association. Buyers new to high-end cards trust the eBay logo before they trust us. We earn our way past that with the PSA cert link on every product page, the signed name at the bottom of every email, and the ability to message me directly before they buy.
Auction mechanics. eBay does one thing we don’t, which is auctions. For 1-of-1 cards where a bidding war is the right price-discovery tool, a marketplace is better. So we use one — but only for that specific kind of card, and only when we’re not the consignor. Everything else, we sell at a set price from here.
We’re not pretending eBay has no advantages. We’re saying, card by card, the math works for us to sell from home.
Why this matters beyond the math
Marketplaces treat every seller like a SKU. The eBay algorithm does not know my name. It does not know that my boys are the ones who photographed this card. It does not know the story of where a particular card came from, or that we graded it ourselves, or that if it arrives bent I will personally pack the replacement.
A marketplace optimizes for price and shipping speed. That’s it. Which is a great thing when you’re buying a standard-issue consumer product. It’s a worse thing when you’re buying a card that ought to carry a story with it.
We built this site because we wanted the story to come with the card. That requires a place for the story to live, which means a homepage, an About page, a Journal, and an honest trust layer — none of which fit inside a 12-image eBay listing template.
It also means we’re accountable in a different way. On eBay, a bad review is one of thousands. Here, a bad review is about us. My name is at the top of the page. That accountability is the point.
What this does not mean
- We’re not saying eBay is bad. It’s the largest hobby marketplace in the world for good reasons.
- We’re not saying every seller should run their own site. Small sellers without inventory depth or the time to maintain a store will pay the fee and be fine.
- We’re not saying marketplaces go away. They won’t. They’ll still be the default for most buyers for a long time.
We’re saying we did the math, and for our collection, our voice, and our goals, selling from here was the right answer.
If the math matches for your collection too — or if you want to see how we built this — you know where to find us.
What to look at next
- See how we verify any card we sell → How to Verify a PSA Cert
- See what we’re selling right now → The Shop
- The rules we use to decide what gets bought, kept, and sold → How We Collect
— John Phillips
Jacksonville, Florida
Published April 2026