Sports Card Marketplace Fees Compared: eBay, COMC, PWCC, and TCGplayer
Why fees matter more than the sale price
Two sellers can list the same card for the same price and walk away with very different amounts of cash. The gap comes from fees: a final value fee, a payment processing fee, a per-order fee, and sometimes a separate cash-out fee just to get your money out of the platform. Before picking where to sell, it helps to know what each channel actually takes off the top.
eBay
eBay charges a final value fee of 13.6% on the first $7,500 of a trading card sale (item price, plus shipping, plus tax), dropping to 2.35% on anything above that. There's also a flat $0.30 per-order fee folded into eBay's managed payments. eBay runs a recurring promo that cuts the final value fee in half on single cards that sell for $1,000 or more, so high-end cards often cost less in fees than the standard rate suggests. A no-store seller gets 250 free listings a month; paying for a Store subscription raises that allowance and can lower the fee by another 0.5-2%. The tradeoff: eBay has by far the largest buyer pool of any of these channels, which can mean a higher final sale price even after fees.
COMC (Check Out My Cards)
COMC's fees stack in three separate steps. First, an ingestion fee to get your cards into their system: it ranges from about $0.65 to $2.00 per card depending on how fast you want it processed (their slowest free-ish tier can take up to 16 weeks; their fastest paid tier is about 2 weeks). Second, a 5% sale transaction fee when a card actually sells. Third, if you want actual cash instead of store credit, a 10% cash-out fee applies (with a $1 flat minimum on cash-outs under $250). That cash-out fee is the one sellers miss most often. A card that nets $50 in COMC store credit only nets about $45 once you convert it to real money in your bank account. COMC's fees also tend to eat the whole margin on anything priced under roughly $25, which is why the platform works better for mid-value and higher cards than cheap commons.
PWCC and major auction houses
PWCC and comparable auction platforms (Goldin and similar) charge sellers a commission that typically runs 5-15% depending on the card's value and the listing type, plus a separate buyer's premium that PWCC collects from the buyer. Because PWCC takes a cut from both sides of the transaction, the effective total cost of the sale is often higher than the seller-facing commission alone suggests. These auction-style platforms tend to make sense for genuinely rare or high-grade cards where a bidding war can push the final price up enough to absorb the higher fee structure. They're a poor fit for bulk selling or common cards.
TCGplayer
TCGplayer charges a commission of 10.25% to 15.25% depending on your seller tier and the card type, plus a 2.5% payment processing fee. On a $100 card at the entry Silver tier, that works out to roughly 12.75% in total fees, which is meaningfully less than eBay's roughly 15.95% total (13.25% final value fee plus 2.7% payment processing) for a comparable sale. TCGplayer tends to be the cheaper option for lower-value cards, while eBay's larger buyer pool can still win out on final sale price for cards with real demand.
What this means if you're deciding where to sell
The cheapest listed fee isn't always the cheapest real outcome. A platform with a lower percentage but a smaller buyer pool can net you less than a platform with a higher fee but more bidders driving the price up. And fees that look small in isolation (an ingestion fee, a cash-out fee, a per-order fee) add up fast on lower-value cards. Before you commit a card or a whole collection to one of these fee structures, it's worth knowing what it's actually worth first. The Binder gives you an AI-driven fair market valuation based on condition, grading, rarity, and recent comparable sales, so you know the real number before you decide where, or whether, to sell.