Whatnot profit calculator
Enter tonight's item count, average price and what the inventory cost you, and see the show profit. Free, no sign-in, and nothing you type leaves this tab.
The flat processing fee is charged once for every sale, so this multiplies it by your item count.
Your gross divided by your items, before any fee comes off.
One total for the whole show, the way a lot is bought.
Labels and giveaway postage you cover yourself. Leave at zero if buyers pay.
Your total sales across every category in a four-week period set the tier you pay in the next one, from 21 September 2026 for existing sellers and a week later for new ones. Standard is what you pay below the first threshold, and what most sellers pay.
US: a few states tax one or both fees at local rates. Canada: GST or HST and provincial taxes apply on fees for sales to buyers outside Canada. Australia: 10% GST, charged only to sellers not registered for GST. Leave empty if none applies to you.
40 items at $25.00
8% of $25.00 on each of 40 items
2.9% of $25.00 plus $0.30, on each of 40 sales. The flat part alone is $12.00
As entered, one total for the show
Labels and giveaway postage you cover, as entered
Gross less the fees, the cost and your shipping
Your margin and profit per item
Show profit as a share of the $1,000.00 gross
Show profit spread across 40 items
How is profit on a Whatnot show calculated?
Gross is your item count times your average sale price. Five things come out of it:
- Commission, charged on each item's price.
- Payment processing, charged on each sale, percentage plus a flat amount.
- Tax on those two fees, where it applies to you.
- What the inventory cost you.
- The shipping you pay yourself.
What is left is the show profit, and the margin is that figure as a share of the gross. On the numbers this page opens with, 40 items at $25.00 gross $1,000.00, pay $80.00 of commission and $41.20 of payment processing, carry $600.00 of inventory, and leave $278.80, a margin of 27.88% and $6.97 an item.
The number most sellers miss is the flat part of the payment processing fee. Payment processing is a percentage of the order total plus a flat amount, and the flat amount is charged once for every sale, not once on the show and not once per package. Sell 60 items and you pay it sixty times: at $0.30 in the US, Canada and Australia that is $18.00 before the percentage is counted at all. This calculator multiplies it by your item count accordingly, which is why the results card names the flat part on its own line. What it is really counting is sales: several cards listed and sold together as one item are one sale carrying one flat fee, and a listing that sells ten times over is ten. Type the number of sales you expect, which for a show of singles is the number of cards.
Commission works the same way, item by item. The calculator works out one item's fee and multiplies it rather than taking a percentage of the whole night, because that is how the fees are actually charged and fees land on whole cents. Ten items at $12.34 pay ten lots of 99 cents, three cents more than 8% of the $123.40 gross. Small, and real.
Pick your region above and the whole schedule follows at once, the two rates and the flat amount together, with tax on the fees added where it applies to you. The per-region specifics and a worked example live in the guide: Whatnot fees explained. For one sale on its own, use the fee calculator, which runs the same fee code this page does.
How do you estimate profit on a card break?
The same four numbers, read the way a breaker buys. Enter the spots you expect to sell and what they average, then put the case or box cost in as the inventory cost: one total for the night, which is how a lot is bought and how BreakCount treats it. The calculator takes commission off every spot, the flat fee off every spot sold and the case cost off the total, and prints what the break leaves.
A break is where the flat fee bites hardest, because a break sells a lot of small tickets. Thirty $12 spots and one $360 card gross the same, and the thirty spots pay the flat fee thirty times.
What this estimate does not cover
An average is a fair model for the fees themselves. Both fees scale with the price, and the flat part depends only on how many sales there were, so a night of even prices and a night carried by one big hit pay near enough the same fees on the same gross and the same number of sales. Where the spread really bites is everything the fees are not: a night that made its money on one card is a different business from a night of fifty steady spots, even when the two totals match.
The estimate is only ever as good as the two numbers nobody knows before going live, how many items sell and what they average. This is honest arithmetic on what you typed, not a promise about the night.
Refunds are not in here. A refunded order comes back out of your numbers on the other side, as its own row in the report, and only the report after the show can say which ones happened. Giveaways are not in here either: they carry no commission and no payment processing fee, because the buyer pays nothing, but you still pay the postage, which is why giveaways show up in a Whatnot report as small negative amounts. Put that postage in the shipping box if you want it counted. Promotions are not modelled at all, because they change.
Other costs are not in here either. A subscription, supplies, mileage and the rest sit below the show rather than inside it, which is why what this page prints is show profit: what the night itself made. Net profit is that figure across every show in a period, less those other costs.
Two smaller simplifications, both stated so you can judge them. Buyer-paid shipping and buyer-paid tax are treated as zero, and both only ever raise the payment processing base, so a real show pays a few cents more per sale than this says. And the high-value commission cap is not applied here: it caps commission at the first $1,500 of one item's price, and a per-item cap almost never binds at an averaged price. Run a single big card through the fee calculator on its own instead.
Deciding what to open the bidding at rather than what the night will make? The break-even calculator runs this maths backwards, one item at a time.
Common questions
How do you estimate what a Whatnot show will make?
Four numbers do it. Take the items you expect to sell times the average price for the gross, then take off commission on each item, payment processing on each sale, any tax charged on those fees, what the inventory cost you and the shipping you pay. What is left is the show profit, and this page does that arithmetic as you type.
Does the $0.30 fee apply per item, per sale or per order?
Per sale, which for a show of singles means per item. Whatnot's schedule states that fees apply each time a buyer checks out, and are calculated separately per transaction even when purchases are later bundled into one order or shipment. So count the sales you expect rather than the cards: a card that sells as its own item carries its own $0.30, several cards sold together as one item carry one between them, and one listing that sells ten times carries ten. Other regions charge their own flat amount; pick yours above.
What is a good profit margin on Whatnot?
It depends on what you sell and what you paid for it, so no single number is honest. A breaker opening cases lives on a different margin from a seller listing singles already sitting in a box. This page prints your own margin instead: show profit as a share of the gross, for the show you just described.
Asking what other sellers clear rather than what your own night will? That is a different question with a longer answer: how much Whatnot sellers make.
Where these rates come from
Every rate on this page comes from one module, and the per-sale fee calculator runs the same code on the same rates. The two pages cannot quote different fees for the same sale, because there is only one place for a fee to be wrong.
Fee rates checked 18 September 2026 against Whatnot's published schedule, and the tax-on-fees rules against its taxes article as revised 17 July 2026. The schedule itself is dated 17 September 2026; the commission tiers were captured 18 September 2026 and the processing rates 31 August 2026. Actual fees can differ with promotions, categories and taxes, so this is an estimate. Everything you type stays in this browser tab; there is no submit and nothing is stored.
An estimate is a plan. BreakCount does the same arithmetic on the show that actually happened, refunds and giveaways included: import your Whatnot Weekly Order Report, add one cost per purchase lot, and every show ends with a real show profit instead of a guess, with your other costs taken off to give the month its net profit, at one flat price.