Search for advice on eBay vs own website and you’ll find forum threads old enough to sit their GCSEs. The honest, current answer is more interesting than either camp admits: eBay hands you buyers on day one and quietly takes a double-digit slice of every business sale, while your own website keeps nearly all the money and starts with precisely zero visitors. We checked every number below against eBay’s current UK fee schedule and recent rate-card changes on 7 August 2026, and worked the maths on a real £30 order and a real £2,000-a-month shop. We build Orbit, a UK ecommerce platform, so we have a horse in this race — but the numbers came first, and one of our conclusions is that most sellers shouldn’t leave eBay at all.
First, the trap: “private seller” is not a tax status
Since 2024, private sellers on eBay UK pay no selling fees on most domestic listings — buyers pay a Buyer Protection fee on top of the price instead, and the seller keeps the full amount. Business sellers, meanwhile, pay every fee in the next section. So thousands of UK sellers quietly stay on private accounts, assuming the account toggle is what decides things.
It isn’t. HMRC decides whether you’re trading, and it doesn’t care what your eBay settings say. Clearing out your own wardrobe and old possessions isn’t trading, however much it fetches. But if you buy things intending to resell them, or make things to sell — even as a hobby — that’s trading, and once your trading income passes the £1,000 trading allowance in a tax year, you need to tell HMRC. Online platforms, eBay included, now report seller activity to HMRC directly, so the gap between “private account” and “obviously running a shop” is visible to the one institution you least want noticing it. If you’re trading, eBay’s own rules require a business account too. The realistic position for anyone reading a “should I get my own website” article is: you’re a business seller, so business fees are your fees. (Whether you should also formalise the business is a separate question — our guide to sole trader vs limited company covers it.)
What eBay actually charges UK business sellers
Checked 7 August 2026, a UK business seller pays, per order:
- Final value fee: roughly 6.9%–14.9% depending on category, with most everyday categories between 9.9% and 12.9%. Books, media and much of consumer tech sit at 9.9%; Business, Office & Industrial rose to 12.5% in February 2026; Jewellery & Watches tops the table at 14.9% on the first £1,000. The percentage applies to the total the buyer pays, postage included.
- Per-order fee: £0.40 on orders over £10 (raised from 30p on 12 February 2026; orders of £10 or under stay at 30p).
- Regulatory operating fee: 0.35% of the total sale.
- VAT at 20% on all of the above. Reclaimable if you’re VAT-registered; a pure extra cost if you’re not. (Confused about which side of that line you’re on? See UK VAT for online sellers.)
- Promoted Listings: typically 2–5% extra, seller-set. Optional in theory; in crowded categories, unpromoted listings sink, so most serious sellers treat 2–3% as a cost of doing business.
- Listing costs: without a Shop subscription, business listings cost around 30p each to insert; a Basic Shop (£27/month + VAT) bundles 250 fixed-price listings.
eBay fees vs own website: the same £30 order
Take a £30 order (item plus postage) in a typical 12.9% category — pet supplies, crafts and similar — sold by a business seller who isn’t VAT-registered. Against it, the same order on your own Orbit site, where the only per-order cost is card processing (2% + 25p on the Solo plan, with no platform fee on sales):
| Cost on a £30 order | eBay (business seller) | Own website (Orbit Solo) |
|---|---|---|
| Final value fee (12.9%) | £3.87 | — |
| Per-order fee | £0.40 | — |
| Regulatory operating fee (0.35%) | £0.11 | — |
| VAT on fees (20%) | £0.87 | — |
| Card processing (2% + 25p) | — | £0.85 |
| Total taken | £5.25 (17.5%) | £0.85 (2.8%) |
| With Promoted Listings at 3% (+VAT) | £6.33 (21.1%) | — |
Fees checked 7 August 2026. If you’re VAT-registered you reclaim the VAT line, which brings eBay down to about £4.38 (14.6%) — still five times the own-site figure. And to be fair in the other direction: the own-site column excludes the platform’s monthly cost, which is exactly why a single order proves nothing. Monthly volume is where the comparison gets real.
The £2,000-a-month shop
Say you turn over £2,000 a month across 67 orders averaging £30, in that same 12.9% category, not VAT-registered:
- eBay: £258 in final value fees + £7 regulatory fee + £26.80 in per-order fees = £291.80, plus £58.36 VAT — about £350 a month (17.5%). Add Promoted Listings at 3% and you’re at about £422 (21.1%), before any Shop subscription.
- Own website: Orbit Solo at £25/month + £40 card percentage + £16.75 in 25p fees = about £82 a month (4.1%) — less on yearly billing, where Solo drops to £19/month.
That’s roughly £270–£340 a month, or £3,200–£4,100 a year, on a shop most people would call small. And the gap widens as you grow, because eBay’s take is a percentage forever, while your own site’s fixed cost shrinks as a share of sales. At £5,000 a month the same maths gives eBay roughly £875+ and an Orbit site about £142.
What eBay does better than your own website
Now the part fee-comparison articles skip. That 17.5% buys something genuinely hard to replicate: demand. eBay puts your listing in front of millions of UK buyers with payment details saved and intent to purchase, on day one. It handles buyer trust — a shopper who’d never risk £30 on an unknown website will happily buy from an unknown eBay seller, because eBay’s protection absorbs the risk. It gives you price discovery, a search-driven long tail for obscure items, and instant credibility for used, refurbished and collectible stock, where it remains the UK default. Your new website has none of that. It has an acquisition problem you must solve with SEO, email, social or ads — and if you plan to solve it with ads alone, you can easily spend more than 17.5% learning how. Anyone who tells you to simply leave eBay is selling something.
What your own website does that eBay never will
The deeper cost of eBay isn’t the fee — it’s that eBay owns the customer. You can’t email past buyers a new-stock announcement, build a repeat-purchase habit, or follow up an abandoned basket; eBay’s rules keep the relationship theirs, so every sale is rented, never owned. On your own site the buyer is yours: their email, their order history, their consent to hear from you again. Repeat orders arrive at 2.8% cost instead of 17.5%, marketing tools like abandoned-cart recovery actually work because you can contact people, and no algorithm change or fee rise (see: February 2026) can reprice your business overnight. You also stop competing in a grid of near-identical listings sorted by price — on your own site, nobody undercuts you by 50p in the same search results.
The honest answer: run both, synced
This isn’t actually an either/or. The strategy that fits almost every UK seller: keep eBay as your paid acquisition channel, and make your own website the home for margin and repeat business. eBay finds you strangers at 17.5%; your site keeps them at 2.8%. A packing-slip insert, a branded thank-you, decent packaging — over time, a slice of eBay buyers become direct customers, and each one who switches saves you the difference on every future order.
The traditional objection is double-entry admin: two stock counts, two order queues, oversells when both channels sell the same last unit. That’s the specific problem Orbit’s eBay plugin exists to remove — it’s free on every plan, pushes your products to eBay as listings, syncs stock both ways, and drops eBay orders into your normal order queue as native orders, so you pick and pack one list. The same goes for Amazon and Etsy. For the fuller playbook on running channels side by side, see multichannel selling in the UK.
When staying eBay-only makes sense
Honesty cuts both ways, so: stay eBay-only if you’re genuinely clearing personal possessions (it’s free — a website would be absurd); if you sell one-off used or collectible items where eBay’s audience is irreplaceable and repeat purchases don’t exist; if your turnover is small enough that £3,200 a year in fees is cheaper than any hours you’d spend on a second channel; or if you’ve no appetite for even light marketing, because a website nobody visits earns nothing. The website case starts when you sell repeatable products under your own name and expect the same customers to come back. That describes most people googling this question.
Questions people ask us about eBay vs your own website
How much does eBay take from a £30 sale in the UK?
For a business seller in a typical 12.9% category, about £5.25 including VAT on fees — a 12.9% final value fee on the total including postage, a 40p per-order fee, a 0.35% regulatory fee, plus 20% VAT — or around £6.33 with Promoted Listings at 3%. VAT-registered sellers reclaim the VAT, paying about £4.38. Genuine private sellers clearing personal items pay nothing. Checked 7 August 2026.
Do I have to register as a business seller on eBay?
If you buy to resell or make things to sell, you’re trading — that’s HMRC’s test, not eBay’s account toggle. Once trading income passes the £1,000 annual trading allowance you must tell HMRC, and eBay’s rules require traders to use business accounts. Platforms now report seller data to HMRC, so running a shop through a private account is a tax risk, not a fee hack.
Is it cheaper to sell on my own website than on eBay?
Per order, dramatically: about 2.8% in card fees on an Orbit Solo plan versus roughly 17.5% for an eBay business sale. But eBay’s cut buys you buyers, and your own site starts with none — so a website is cheaper in practice once you have repeat customers, an email list, or any steady source of your own traffic. For a £2,000-a-month shop the gap is about £270–£340 every month.
Can I sell on eBay and my own website at the same time?
Yes, and it’s the strategy we’d recommend to most UK sellers: eBay for reaching new buyers, your own site for margin and repeat orders. The catch is keeping stock and orders in sync — Orbit’s free eBay plugin handles that, syncing stock both ways and delivering eBay orders into the same queue as your website orders.