Mercari’s 10% item fee against OfferUp’s $0 local meetup sales
Mercari prices its take as a percentage; OfferUp, after going local-only in fall 2025, has no commission left to charge. List an $80 item on Mercari and the platform deducts 10% of the item price plus whatever the buyer pays for shipping. Move the same item through an OfferUp meetup and the buyer hands over cash while the platform takes nothing. Below, an $80 basket and a $35 basket run through both sides, with the Mercari schedule checked 2026-10-23 and the OfferUp shipping shutdown pinned to exact dates.
Last updated · Mercari figures from Feebrief’s Mercari fee record (checked 2026-10-23) and Mercari’s fee page; OfferUp figures checked against OfferUp’s help pages on 2026-10-31; the shipping-ending notice was captured 2026-09-22 · United States, USD.
Feebrief isn’t affiliated with either marketplace, and nothing here is an official calculator. Both companies revise their schedules — usually through a help-center note rather than an announcement — so every figure carries the date it was last checked, letting you judge its freshness yourself.
Mercari’s seller cut on an $80 item
Post an $80 espresso grinder on Mercari, with the buyer paying $8 for shipping, and the selling fee comes to 10% of $88 — $8.80. The payout before label cost is $79.20; if the label ends up costing about the $8 the buyer paid for shipping, the practical net sits near $71.20. Listing itself is free, and payment processing is already folded into the 10% on the seller’s side — no second deduction shows up on the statement.
Two dates govern that 10%, both from Feebrief’s Mercari record: the fee structure became effective Jan 6, 2025, and the item-price-plus-buyer-paid-shipping wording applies to listings created or updated on or after Jan 6, 2026. A listing that predates the newer date and hasn’t been touched since may answer to the earlier schedule — Mercari’s own fee page is where to confirm which one governs a specific listing.
Two charges that look like seller costs aren’t. Mercari’s Buyer Protection payment — about 3.6% — is added at checkout on the buyer’s side, so it never shrinks the seller’s payout. And Seller Tiers, the program that once hinted at discounted fees, ran as a beta and has ended; Feebrief’s record lists no active tier discounts, so every worked example on this page uses the flat 10%.
OfferUp local meetup: $0 commission, and a shipping lane that closed in fall 2025
Sell that same $80 lamp at an OfferUp meetup and the arithmetic is one line long: buyer pays $80, seller keeps $80. OfferUp charges no commission on in-person sales, and listing stays free within monthly category allotments. Sellers who exhaust an allotment can buy extra listings, though those prices generally aren’t posted on the public help pages, so Feebrief quotes no figure for them.
Shipping is where OfferUp’s fee story ends entirely. Two closing dates, recorded when Feebrief captured the notice on 2026-09-22: from 2025-09-23, every new listing was local-only, and by 2025-10-21 the shipping feature had been stripped from the listings that still carried it. Past the second date there is no shipped lane — and with no shipped lane, there can be no shipping fee. Comparison articles still printing an OfferUp shipping percentage are describing something the platform stopped running; Feebrief’s record holds no number from the retired program, so this page marks that cost retired rather than repeating a stale one. The full retirement timeline has its own page at does OfferUp still charge shipping fees, and the broader per-fee breakdown lives at OfferUp seller fees.
Side math: what sellers keep at $80 and $35
Two baskets, one assumption set: US seller, USD; the Mercari side is a shipped listing at the flat 10% with buyer-paid shipping as shown; the OfferUp side is a cash meetup inside the free listing allotment with no Promote+ subscription. Label prices vary, so the Mercari column shows the payout before the label and, beside it, the practical net if the label costs roughly what the buyer paid for shipping.
| Basket | Mercari keep | OfferUp local keep |
|---|---|---|
| $80 item + $8 buyer-paid shipping | $79.20 before the label; about $71.20 if the label runs near the buyer’s $8 | $80.00, cash in hand |
| $35 item + $5 buyer-paid shipping | $36.00 before the label; about $31.00 on the same assumption | $35.00, cash in hand |
Read the columns the right way round: on paper the before-label figures sit close, because the buyer’s shipping payment flows through the Mercari payout on its way to covering the label. The fee is real money regardless — $8.80 on the first basket, $4.00 on the second — and the label, a cost the cash meetup never faces, generally consumes most of what the buyer paid for shipping. The pricier the item, the wider the dollar gap, since 10% scales with price and zero doesn’t.
Promote+, priced flat: $19.99 a month or $99.99 a year
Promote+ is the one recurring dollar figure in OfferUp’s column, and it belongs to a different category of cost. At $19.99 per month or $99.99 per year, it buys extra visibility for listings — a subscription billed on the calendar, not a charge tied to any transaction. A seller who subscribes and never sells still pays it; a seller who subscribes and moves $2,000 of furniture at meetups pays the same $19.99. Either way, the commission on each local sale stays $0. Whether the visibility is worth the price typically depends on category competition and listing quality, and Feebrief makes no claim there — the only honest statement for a fee page is that it’s optional.
A deeper Mercari guide, and why no OfferUp calculator exists
Feebrief keeps a full Mercari fee page — the 10% structure, both January dates, Buyer Protection handling, and label notes — written and edited here as an informational deep dive, not a partnership or a payout tool. OfferUp gets no calculator on Feebrief, and the omission is deliberate: a platform whose only mandatory seller cost is $0, plus one optional flat subscription, has no percentage engine to build. The table above is the entire computation.
Sellers’ questions, answered
What does Mercari deduct from an $80 item?
With the buyer paying $8 for shipping, Mercari’s selling fee is 10% of the $88 total, or $8.80. The payout before label cost is $79.20; if the label costs roughly the $8 the buyer paid for shipping, the practical net sits near $71.20. Listing is free, and payment processing is already folded into the 10% for sellers — the roughly 3.6% Buyer Protection charge is added to the buyer’s side of checkout, not subtracted from the seller’s payout.
What happened to shipping on OfferUp?
Two dates close the book: from 2025-09-23 every new OfferUp listing was local-only, and by 2025-10-21 the shipping feature had been stripped from the listings that still carried it. There is no shipped lane left, so there is no shipping fee left either. Feebrief’s record holds no number from the retired program, so this page marks that cost retired rather than printing a stale figure; guides that still show an OfferUp shipping percentage are describing a feature the platform stopped running.
Is Promote+ required to sell on OfferUp?
No. Promote+ is a visibility subscription at $19.99 per month or $99.99 per year — a flat bill that arrives on the calendar whether you sell anything or not, never a charge that scales with a transaction. A local meetup sale pays $0 commission with or without it.
Does Mercari charge sellers a payment processing fee?
No separate one. Processing is included for the seller inside the 10% selling fee. The roughly 3.6% Buyer Protection payment is collected from the buyer at checkout, so it never comes out of the seller’s payout.
Do Mercari’s Seller Tiers still discount the fee?
No. Seller Tiers ran as a beta and has ended. Feebrief’s Mercari record lists no active tier discounts, and every worked example on this page uses the flat 10% of item price plus buyer-paid shipping.
Related comparisons
- Facebook Marketplace vs OfferUp fees — the other $0-local matchup, where only one side ever charged for shipping
- OfferUp vs eBay fees — local cash against a 13.6% percentage-plus-per-order structure
- How much OfferUp takes — the take-rate question on its own page
- Mercari seller fees — the full deep dive behind this page’s 10% column
- Resale marketplace fees compared — the category hub this comparison sits in
Where each number came from
Mercari figures — the 10% of item price plus buyer-paid shipping, free listing, processing included for sellers, Buyer Protection at roughly 3.6% buyer-paid, and the ended Seller Tiers beta — come from Feebrief’s Mercari fee record, last checked 2026-10-23 against Mercari’s fee page. OfferUp figures — the $0 in-person commission and Promote+ at $19.99/month or $99.99/year — were checked against OfferUp’s help pages on 2026-10-31. The shipping retirement dates of 2025-09-23 and 2025-10-21 come from OfferUp’s shipping-ending notice, captured 2026-09-22. Paid-listing prices aren’t posted on the help pages Feebrief can read, so they’re treated as unavailable rather than estimated. How Feebrief sources, checks, and dates every rate is documented on the methodology page.
Disclosure
Feebrief is an independent fee-information site. It holds no account relationship, resale partnership, or data-sharing agreement with Mercari or OfferUp, and this page is neither an official calculator nor a help document for either company. Every figure is republished from Feebrief’s own dated records; if a platform changes a rate after its check date, the date — not the stale number — is what tells you. Any commercial arrangements that exist elsewhere on the site are documented at /disclosure/.