Editorial Policy

Seller Fee Desk shows what online marketplaces, payment apps and carriers charge, and what that leaves the seller. People price items and choose where to sell from these numbers, so the rules for what gets published are strict. This page sets them out, and says what happens when something is wrong.

Who is responsible

Seller Fee Desk is an independent site run by an individual based in the United States. The site is published under its own name, Seller Fee Desk, which is the author of every tool and guide. It is not run by a tax professional, accountant or attorney, so the site stays within a clear lane: how the fees and numbers are calculated, and what the cited sources say. There are no guest posts and no paid contributors.

What the site covers, and what it doesn’t

Covered: marketplace and payment fees and what they are charged on, net payout and profit per item, list prices and break-even prices, published USPS prices and dimensional weight, the federal and state Form 1099-K rules, and the arithmetic of self-employment tax — all from primary sources.
Not covered: tax, legal or accounting advice for your situation; what you owe; sales-tax rates by address (the marketplace charges the rate for the buyer’s address); disputes with a platform.
Each guide answers one concrete question. We don’t publish several pages that say the same thing under different keywords, and we don’t generate pages for every category or price point.
State-dependent rules are shown for all 50 states and DC, or for several states from different regions with how to check your own — never as if every reader lived in one state.

How fee data is sourced and dated

Every fee, rate, minimum, cap and tier a tool uses comes from the platform’s own help, fee or policy page, or from its official announcement, and is recorded with the address of that page and the date it was read.
Fee rules are stored with the dates they take effect, so a tool uses the rule in force on the sale or ship date you enter — including announced changes that have not started yet.
Every tool shows “Fee rates as of …, verified …” next to its result. Our rule is to re-read every platform’s fee sources at least once a month and whenever a change is announced. The site’s build refuses to publish once any platform’s data has gone 62 days without being verified.
When a rule can’t be confirmed on the platform’s own pages, the tool says “Not modeled” with the reason, or shows a range where a published rule has two readings. We don’t fill gaps with guesses or with figures from other calculators or forums.
No platform publishes how it rounds fees. The tools round each fee to the cent and then add, and say that the platform may round differently by a cent.

The fee change log

The fee change log lists each confirmed change with its effective date (and the date it was announced, when different), the platform, what changed in plain words, the tools it affects, a link to the platform’s own page with that page’s date, and the date we verified it. Upcoming changes are listed with the date they take effect.

A change is published only when the platform’s own pages confirm it. Changes reported elsewhere but not confirmed by the platform are kept out of the log and out of the tools until they are. If a row turns out to be wrong, it is corrected on the row with a dated note.

How guides are sourced

Primary sources first: the platforms’ own help, fee and policy pages; the IRS, congress.gov and the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations; the Social Security Administration; USPS price lists and the Domestic Mail Manual; state revenue departments; and software vendors’ own pricing and help pages for what a vendor says about itself.
Every guide lists its sources at the end with the date each one was read, and important claims link to the source where they are made. Forums, content farms, AI summaries and competitors’ blogs are not used as evidence.
A claim that can’t be traced to a source isn’t published as fact. Guides report what the sources say and attribute it; they don’t claim hands-on testing, selling experience, customer stories or results.
Every number in a worked example is computed with the same rules the tools use, then checked against the site’s own tools.

Use of AI tools

Guides are researched and drafted with AI writing tools that work to the rules on this page. Before a guide is published, a separate review pass checks every factual statement against its cited source and recomputes every worked example; a statement that cannot be confirmed in a source is corrected or removed. Sources are never invented: each one listed was opened and read during that process, on the date shown.

Dates and updates

Each guide shows the date it was first published and the date it was last updated. The updated date changes only when the content changes in substance — including every fee change that alters a number in the guide — not for cosmetic edits.

Corrections

If you find an error, email hello@sellerfeedesk.com with the page address and, if possible, a source. We check every report. When a factual error is confirmed, we fix it and add a dated “Correction” note on the page that says what changed. Spelling and formatting fixes are made without a note.

Tools

The tools follow the fee rules and assumptions stated on each page, and their arithmetic is covered by automated tests that compare results with independently worked examples. If a tool produces something wrong, it is fixed first and explained second. Please report problems through the contact page.

Advertising is separate from content

Ads are served by Google AdSense. Each ad position is labeled “Advertisements”, sits in its own box, and is never placed inside a tool, a table or the middle of a sentence.
Advertisers have no say in what we write, and we don’t know in advance which ads Google will show. An ad on a page is not a recommendation.
Guides never ask readers to click ads.

How software is compared

Software comparisons are built from each vendor’s public pricing and help pages, read on the date shown on the page; when a price isn’t public, we say so. Every app is described by the same criteria and listed in an order set by a neutral rule stated on the page, such as yearly cost at a given listing volume. A vendor that pays a commission is described by the same rules as one that doesn’t, and a higher commission never buys a better description or position. We don’t claim hands-on testing we haven’t done.

How gear is chosen

Gear lists name quality tools for a reseller’s desk — label printers, shipping scales, lighting, garment care — by brand and exact model, with facts taken from the maker’s own product page and the date it was read. An item is listed because it fits the job the page is about, not because of its commission. We don’t claim to have tried an item, we don’t publish ratings, and we don’t show prices: check the current price on the seller’s page.

Independence

Seller Fee Desk is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by eBay, Poshmark, Mercari, Depop, Etsy, Whatnot, Meta (Facebook Marketplace), Amazon, StockX, GOAT, TikTok (TikTok Shop), Vinted, Grailed, PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, Apple (Apple Cash), the U.S. Postal Service or any other company named on this site. Names are trademarks of their owners and are used only to identify their services.

Platform names appear in plain text, only to say which service a fee or rule belongs to. The site uses no platform’s logo, screenshots, colors or typefaces, and Seller Fee Desk is not a marketplace, a crosslisting app or a shipping-label seller.