Promoted and Boosted Listings, and What They Cost

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Three marketplaces on this site have something called a "promotion," and they aren't the same kind of thing. Two of them — eBay's Promoted Listings and Depop's boost — add a fee to a sale in exchange for more visibility. Whatnot's is the reverse: it removes part of a fee automatically, with nothing to opt into and nothing to pay. Lumping all three together as "advertising" would hide that difference, so this page treats them separately, then asks the one question they share: for the two that cost money, how big a sale, or how much extra price, does it take to break even?

eBay Promoted Listings: only the pay-per-sale strategy is priced here

eBay runs two campaign strategies. The priority strategy charges per click, whether or not the click turns into a sale — a cost that depends on an auction this site has no data for, so it isn't modeled anywhere. The general strategy only charges when the promoted item sells, at an ad rate you set yourself, applied to the same total amount of the sale as the final value fee: item, buyer-paid shipping, tax and other fees together. That's the strategy the eBay fee calculator's promoted-rate field prices. On that calculator's own $50 example — $8 shipping, 7% tax, a $62.06 total — a 5% ad rate adds $3.10 on top of the $8.44 final value fee, dropping profit from $29.16 to $26.06.

Depop's boost: 12% of the item, plus shipping only without a Depop label

Depop's boosting fee is 12% for US sellers, charged only if a buyer saw the boosted tag and bought within 28 days — you're still on the hook if that happens after you turn boosting off. The base it's charged on depends on your shipping label. Take a $60 item with $10 of buyer-paid shipping: shipped on your own label, the boost is 12% of the full $70, or $8.40. Ship the same sale on a Depop label instead, and the boost is charged on the $60 item price alone — $7.20, a dollar twenty less, for the identical sale. Depop's fee, unlike eBay's, never touches sales tax; it's charged before tax is added, not after.

Whatnot's high-value promotion: a discount, not a purchase

Whatnot's "Reduced Commission on High-Value Orders" isn't a boost a seller turns on. It's an automatic 0% commission on the part of an order above $1,500, limited to a named list of categories — comics, toys and hobbies, coins and money, trading card games, entertainment cards, the Sports Singles subcategories, bags and accessories, and jewelry and watches. Whatnot's own example: a $2,000 item in one of those categories pays standard commission, 8% for a Standard-tier US seller, on the first $1,500 only — $120.00 — and 0% on the remaining $500, instead of the $160.00 a non-qualifying $2,000 sale at the same rate would owe. There's no fee to weigh against a benefit here, because there's no fee at all. Whatnot calls it a limited-time promotion it can end or change without notice, which is exactly why Whatnot's seller fee tiers, explained leaves it out of the calculator's own numbers rather than guessing at how long it lasts.

What the paid ones have to earn back

Only eBay's general-strategy ad rate and Depop's boost cost anything, so only those two need to pay for themselves. There are two ways a promotion can do that. If it sold an item that would not have sold at all without the extra visibility, it pays for itself the moment the sale is profitable after its own fee — the alternative to any profit was zero. On the eBay example above, $26.06 clears that bar easily. If, instead, the promotion only let you charge more for a sale you'd have made anyway, the fee itself has to be beaten by the extra price, and that extra price is pushed through the same ad rate and final value fee that made the fee non-zero in the first place — a bigger sale costs more to promote, too. Run your own numbers both ways through the eBay or Depop calculator, once with the promotion off and once at your real rate, and the difference between the two payouts is exactly what that listing's promotion cost.

What this site can't tell you

Nothing here measures whether a promoted or boosted listing actually sells faster, sells at all, or reaches a buyer who wouldn't otherwise have found the item. That's a question about clicks, views and conversion on each platform's own traffic, and this site has no source for any of it. What it can price, exactly, is the fee side of the trade. Whether the other side of that trade is worth it is a call only your own sales history can make.

Sources

1. eBay Help: Promoted Listings overview ebay.com
2. Depop Help: Boosted Listings Policy (effective March 23, 2026) depophelp.zendesk.com
3. Depop Help: Boosted Listings depophelp.zendesk.com
4. Whatnot Help Center: Reduced Commission on High-Value Orders help.whatnot.com