Amazon vs eBay — a catalogue against a listings board

What this comparison covers

• The short answer
• Catalogue against listings board
• The used-goods question, which decides most cases
• What each takes when something sells
• What it takes to list at all
• Selling formats, returns and the things only eBay has
• Fulfilment, and the trap for multi-channel sellers
• Who owns the listing, and the customer
• Reach, and the numbers nobody publishes
• Which one, for which stock
• Running both without overselling
• What FLUF costs
• Sources and verification
• Related guides

The short answer

Sell on eBay if your stock is used, unique, unbarcoded, or anything whose condition and provenance are part of what the buyer is paying for. Sell on Amazon if your stock is new, barcoded, and something a buyer would search for by product name rather than by browsing.

That is not a hedge. The two platforms are built on opposite assumptions about what a listing is, and the assumption fits some inventory and fights other inventory. A seller with 200 identical new phone cases and a seller with 200 different second-hand jackets are not really choosing between the same two options.

Catalogue against listings board

On eBay, when you list something, you create a page. It has your title, your photographs, your description, your condition wording. If you have a rare variant, an unusual colourway, a flaw worth disclosing or a story worth telling, all of that lives on the page and the buyer sees it.

On Amazon, you attach an offer to a page that already exists. That page — identified by a ten-character ASIN — carries its own title, its own photographs and its own bullet points, and it is shared by every seller offering that item. Amazon then chooses which of those competing offers to feature: what Amazon calls the Featured Offer and everyone else calls the Buy Box. Amazon describes it as “the prominent area at the top of a product detail page where customers can select Add to Cart or Buy Now”, and every offer that does not win it is relegated to an “Other sellers on Amazon” panel most buyers never open.

The consequences are stark and they are not really about money.

Your listing craft has nowhere to go on Amazon. The photography, the title work, the description — the things that make an eBay listing outperform an identical one three rows down — are invisible on an Amazon offer attached to an existing ASIN. What you compete on instead is price, condition grade, delivery speed and seller metrics. Amazon names those as the Featured Offer drivers explicitly, along with being in stock, and notes that an offer priced too high, or suspiciously low, is ineligible.

A unique item is Amazon’s hard case and eBay’s easy one. Everywhere on eBay, a one-off is the simplest listing you can make. On Amazon there is nothing to attach to, so you must create a catalogue entry, which needs a barcode or an approved exemption and, for a branded product, authorisation from the brand.

Matching wrongly on Amazon is worse than not listing. Attach your offer to the wrong ASIN and you have promised a buyer a specific product with specific specifications. Amazon treats the resulting complaint as an inauthentic or not-as-described item, which is one of the faster routes to an account problem. eBay has no equivalent failure mode, because there is nothing to mismatch against.

The used-goods question, which decides most cases

Both platforms accept second-hand goods. They accept very different second-hand goods, and the difference is a policy line rather than a matter of degree.

Amazon’s published UK condition guidelines carry an explicit New only section, and it names Apparel, Shoes and Bags, Sports, Baby, Pet and Grocery, plus everything consumable, ingestible or topical — Beauty, Food, Health Care and Vitamins. Its wording for the first of those is flat: “Only New items are permitted to be sold in the Apparel category on Amazon.co.uk.”

Read that list against what actually moves on eBay and the picture is clear. Pre-owned clothing, trainers, handbags and sportswear — a substantial share of everything sold second-hand online — cannot be listed on Amazon at all. Not priced badly, not disadvantaged: prohibited.

Where Amazon does permit used, it permits it properly. The same guidelines set out per-category condition definitions for Books, Music, Videos and DVDs, Video Games, Automotive, Electronics & Photo, Home & Garden, Large Appliances, Office Products, Software and Toys. Ink and toner is a special case, permitted only with Seller Support approval, with Certified Refurbished prohibited outright. For a second-hand bookseller or a games and consoles trader, Amazon is arguably the most liquid market that exists.

Amazon also grades used far more rigidly than eBay does, on a fixed ladder — New, Used – Like New or Open Box, Very Good, Good, Acceptable, with a separate Collectible tier for books, music, video and games. The Amazon guide sets those definitions out in full.

eBay has condition fields too, but the free-text description carries most of the weight and the buyer expects to read it. On Amazon the equivalent is the condition note — capped at 2,000 characters, and the one place on an offer where your own words survive.

One trap for anyone crossing over: “new without tags” is a fashion-marketplace concept that does not translate. By Amazon’s definition an item that has never been sold but is not factory-sealed is used. Grading it New is a misrepresentation — and on a New-only category the correct answer is not to list it at all.

What each takes when something sells

eBay

eBay’s fees have moved a long way, and the direction for private sellers has been downward — but the cost moved rather than disappeared, and it is worth being precise about that.

On eBay UK, private sellers pay no final value fee and no regulatory operating fee, with 300 free listings a month — 400 with a Shop — and 35p per listing beyond that. A 3% international fee applies only when you are delivering outside the UK. eBay’s own wording: “It’s now free for UK-based private sellers to sell on eBay (excluding motors…). You won’t pay final value fees or regulatory operating fees when your items sell.”

What replaced it is a buyer-paid fee. From 4 February 2025, eBay added a Buyer Protection fee on UK private-seller listings: “A flat fee of £0.10 per item, and 7% of the item price up to £20, and 4% of any portion of the item price from £20 to £300, and 2% of any portion from £300 to £4,000”, with nothing charged above £4,000. It is not optional, it is baked into the displayed price, and it is waived when the buyer is buying from a business seller. So the money did not leave the transaction — it changed pockets, and it makes your item look dearer at the point of sale even though your proceeds are untouched.

Two further exceptions matter. A private seller not based in the UK, selling on eBay UK, pays 12.8% plus 30p per order plus a 0.42% regulatory operating fee. And UK business sellers are on their own schedule entirely: a final value fee of 9.9% to 12.9% by category, plus 30p or 40p per order, plus a 0.35% regulatory operating fee and an international fee of 1.05% to 2.0% depending on destination.

In the US the picture is conventional: most categories carry a final value fee of 13.6% up to $7,500 and 2.35% above it, plus a per-order fee of $0.30 on orders up to $10 and $0.40 above. Books, Movies and Music are 15.3%; Jewelry and Watches 15% up to $5,000 then 9%; Guitars and Basses 6.7%.

Amazon

Amazon charges on two axes. First a selling plan: in the UK, Individual is £0.75 excluding VAT per item sold with no subscription, Professional is £25 excluding VAT a month with no per-item charge. In the US the same pair is $0.99 and $39.99. Divide one by the other and Professional starts paying for itself at roughly 34 UK sales a month, or 41 US ones.

Then, on top, a referral fee on every sale. Amazon’s pricing pages put the range at 5% to 45% by category, with a minimum of £0.25 in the UK and $0.30 in the US on most categories. Some published examples:

The table makes the real shape visible, and it is not “one is cheaper”. For a UK private seller, eBay is free and Amazon frequently will not accept the stock at all. For a UK business selling new goods, Amazon’s banded clothing schedule beats eBay handsomely at the bottom of the price range and loses at the top, while its Home band flips from cheaper to dearer at £20. In the US the two land within a couple of points of each other in most categories, and the deciding factor stops being fees entirely.

What that adds up to

For a UK private seller shifting used goods, the gap is not close. eBay takes nothing on the sale. Amazon takes a category percentage plus a plan fee, on stock that in many of the relevant categories it will not accept anyway.

For a UK business selling new stock the comparison becomes a genuine one, and the answer is category-dependent rather than platform-dependent. Amazon’s banded UK clothing schedule is unusually generous at the bottom — a £12 new top costs 5%, which is cheaper than most fashion marketplaces charge at any price. Amazon Device Accessories at 45% is at the other extreme. A single “Amazon charges 15%” number is not a useful thing to plan with; read the schedule for your category and your site, and read it again when you add a category.

One further Amazon-specific note: its UK pricing page states that “Starting from April 17, 2026, a 1.5% fuel and logistics-related surcharge will be applied to fulfilment fees.” That is FBA fulfilment, not referral fees, so it does not touch a merchant-fulfilled seller.

What it takes to list at all

This is the difference that surprises people most, because it is invisible until you try.

On eBay, listing is: photographs, a title, a category, a condition, a price. Nothing else is required and nothing is checked against an external database. Two minutes, and something genuinely unique is as easy to list as something mass-produced.

On Amazon, the platform needs to know which catalogue entry you mean. That means an ASIN, or a barcode — EAN, UPC, GTIN or ISBN — that resolves to one. Give it an ASIN and your offer attaches with almost nothing else required beyond price, condition and quantity. Give it a barcode and Amazon matches or, for an entitled seller, creates an entry, which needs a real product type and whatever attributes that product type’s schema demands.

Give it neither and there is no listing. FLUF refuses rather than guessing, with a message that names the fix: add an ASIN or barcode, or create the listing by hand once in Seller Central and let FLUF keep it in sync from then on.

There is an official escape hatch — Amazon’s product ID exemption, granted for private brands, handmade goods, parts and bundles, per category and per store. It is an application rather than a checkbox, and the Amazon guide covers how to get one. The point for this comparison is simply that eBay needs none of it.

That asymmetry has a second-order effect people underestimate. On eBay you can test a category in an afternoon. On Amazon, opening a new category can mean sourcing barcodes, applying for an exemption, or applying for category approval — a process measured in days, and sometimes refused. eBay rewards experimentation; Amazon rewards commitment to a catalogue you already have identifiers for.

Selling formats, returns and the things only eBay has

Three eBay features have no Amazon equivalent at all, and for the right stock any one of them decides the question.

Auctions. eBay still runs them, and for anything whose market price you genuinely do not know — a rare variant, a collectable, an estate lot, a piece of memorabilia — an auction is a price-discovery mechanism rather than a gamble. Amazon has no auction format. On Amazon you must already know what the thing is worth, because you are naming a number against other sellers who have already named theirs.

Best Offer and negotiation. eBay lets a buyer make an offer and lets you counter, and FLUF can handle that automatically on your behalf. Amazon’s marketplace has no consumer-facing negotiation at all: the price is the price, and your only lever is changing it.

Your own shop front. An eBay Shop is yours, with your name on it, and buyers can browse everything you have. Amazon’s storefront exists but is peripheral: the ASIN is the unit of identity, and a buyer arriving at a product page is not arriving at you.

Returns cut the other way. Amazon’s returns policy is largely Amazon’s, applied fairly uniformly and generously, and a seller inherits it. On eBay a private seller has more latitude to set their own returns terms — which is freedom if you are shifting used goods with disclosed flaws, and a competitive disadvantage if your rival two rows down offers free returns and you do not.

Fulfilment, and the trap for multi-channel sellers

Amazon offers FBA: send stock into Amazon’s warehouses in advance and Amazon picks, packs, ships and handles returns, with Prime badging and better Featured Offer odds as the reward. It costs a per-unit fulfilment fee plus storage, which Amazon’s UK page bands from £0.62 per cubic foot per month for clothing between January and September up to £1.51 for standard-size non-clothing in the October-to-December peak. A 1.5% fuel and logistics surcharge was added to fulfilment fees from 17 April 2026.

Here is the part that matters if you are reading a page about running two channels: stock sitting in an Amazon warehouse cannot be posted to an eBay buyer. FBA and multi-channel selling of unique items are close to incompatible. If you have one of something, committing it to FBA takes it off every other channel in practice, whatever your listings say.

Merchant-fulfilled selling — what Amazon calls MFN — keeps the stock with you and behaves exactly like eBay: an order arrives, you pack it, you post it. Everything FLUF publishes to Amazon is created merchant-fulfilled for precisely this reason, and it is the only mode that makes sense for one-off inventory.

eBay has no equivalent programme for most sellers, which is a simplification rather than a gap. Your stock is where it is, and every channel can reach it.

Who owns the listing, and the customer

On eBay the listing is yours. So, to a degree, is the buyer relationship: they can see your other items, follow your shop, and come back to you by name. Feedback accrues to you and is visible.

On Amazon the ASIN is the unit of identity, not the seller. Buyers routinely have no idea who they bought from; many believe they bought from Amazon. Your seller rating matters to the algorithm far more than it matters to the customer, because the customer largely does not look. That is not a criticism — it is the trade. Amazon supplies enormous demand and keeps the relationship; eBay supplies less demand and lets you keep more of it.

If you are building something with a name, that trade is the whole decision, and it is worth making deliberately rather than discovering it after a year.

Reach, and the numbers nobody publishes

eBay reported 136 million active buyers globally in the second quarter of 2026. Amazon does not publish a comparable figure — not a current active-customer count, not a current Prime membership count. The last official Prime number is from the 2020 letter to shareholders, published in April 2021: “We have more than 200 million Prime members worldwide.” Amazon stopped reporting active customer accounts around 2019.

So we are not going to give you an Amazon buyer number, and you should be sceptical of any page that does. Every 2026 figure in circulation is a third-party estimate presented as a disclosure.

What can be said without inventing anything: Amazon is the larger commerce destination by revenue by a wide margin, and its demand skews heavily towards new, searched-for, product-name purchases. eBay’s demand skews towards the used, the discontinued, the collectible and the hard to find. Those are different kinds of traffic, not different quantities of the same traffic, and a seller’s stock usually points clearly at one of them.

Which one, for which stock

Running both without overselling

The reason most sellers end up on both is that the stock splits cleanly, and the reason most of them then run into trouble is the same reason it always is: one physical item promised to two buyers.

Connect Amazon and eBay using their authorisation prompts in FLUF Connect. Neither requires a browser extension. Review the supported sync directions before deciding how to manage stock across both.

The capabilities are not symmetrical, and we would rather set the expectation than let you discover it. On eBay, FLUF drives crosslisting, inventory sync, order sync, relisting and offer management. On Amazon it drives crosslisting, price and stock updates, and sold-elsewhere protection — when an item sells on any other connected channel, your Amazon quantity goes to zero. Order sync is not claimed on Amazon: a sale on Amazon does not yet pull your eBay copy down. The protection runs one way today.

The reason is deliberate. Amazon’s order statuses include Pending, an order whose payment has not cleared and a meaningful share of which Amazon subsequently cancels. Treating one as a sale would delist a real item everywhere else for a sale that never happened. We would rather ship sold-detection late than ship it wrong.

What FLUF costs

7 days for £1, then from £9/month. There is no free plan and no free tier.

Crosslisting, inventory sync, order sync and bulk operations are on every plan. Relisting, offer management and smart pricing are included from Seller (£29/month) upwards; Starter does not include them. Paying annually saves 40%.

Worth knowing for this particular pairing: eBay supports relisting and offer management and Amazon supports neither, so the automation tiers buy you something on one side of this comparison and nothing on the other.

Sources and verification

Every fee, rule and date was checked against a primary source on 7 September 2026.

• Amazon’s UK selling plan pricing page — the £0.75 excl. VAT Individual per-item fee, the £25 excl. VAT Professional monthly fee, the 5%–45% referral range, the £0.25 minimum, the banded UK clothing and Home Products rates, and the 1.5% fuel and logistics surcharge on fulfilment fees from 17 April 2026.
• Amazon’s US selling plan pricing page — the $0.99 and $39.99 plan fees, the $0.30 minimum referral fee, and the Clothing, Electronics, Home & Kitchen, Media and Device Accessories rates quoted.
• Amazon’s UK Condition Guidelines (PDF) — the verbatim “NEW ONLY” wording for Apparel, Shoes and Bags, Sports, Baby, Pet and Grocery and for consumable, ingestible and topical products; the categories where used is permitted; and the ink and toner exception.
• Amazon’s Marketplace Items Condition Guidelines — the verbatim definitions of Used – Like New or Open Box, Very Good, Good and Acceptable, and the Collectible ladders including the statement about books in Good condition.
• Amazon on the Featured Offer — the definition, the selection drivers, the out-of-stock and mispriced exclusions, and the “Other sellers on Amazon” placement.
• Amazon’s GTIN guide and Amazon on generic products — the exemption grounds, the application flow, the roughly 48-hour approval, the per-category and per-store scope, and the irreversibility of a generic designation.
• Amazon Brand Registry — the registered-or-pending trademark requirement and the permanently affixed logo requirement.
• Amazon Handmade — the fee structure and the waiver of the Professional subscription after the first month.
• eBay UK’s private-seller fees page — the verbatim statement that selling is free for UK-based private sellers, no final value or regulatory operating fees, 300 free listings a month (400 with a Shop) and 35p thereafter, the 3% international fee, and the 12.8% plus 30p plus 0.42% schedule for non-UK private sellers.
• eBay UK’s Buyer Protection fee page and its Seller Centre announcement — the 4 February 2025 start date, the £0.10 flat fee, the 7% / 4% / 2% bands up to £4,000, the excluded categories, and that it is waived on purchases from business sellers.
• eBay UK’s business-seller fees page — the 9.9%–12.9% category final value fees, the 30p/40p per-order fee, the 0.35% regulatory operating fee and the 1.05%–2.0% international fees.
• eBay’s US selling fees page — the 13.6% final value fee up to $7,500 then 2.35%, the $0.30 and $0.40 per-order fees, and the Books/Movies/Music, Jewelry & Watches and Guitars & Basses rates.
• Amazon’s 2020 letter to shareholders — the last official Prime figure, “more than 200 million Prime members worldwide”, published April 2021.

What we could not verify, and therefore left out. Any current Amazon active-customer or Prime figure — Amazon does not publish one, so no Amazon buyer number appears anywhere on this page, and the 2026 figures in circulation are third-party estimates. The complete referral-fee schedule for every category and marketplace: both of Amazon’s public pricing pages publish only extracts, and the full tables live behind a Seller Central login. Amazon’s per-size-tier FBA fulfilment fees, which Amazon deliberately omits from its public page in favour of its Revenue Calculator. The definitive list of Amazon categories that are gated or that refuse used offers — the authoritative document requires a seller login, and the New-only list quoted above comes from Amazon’s own UK PDF, whose revision date we cannot pin later than about 2021. Amazon’s current title, bullet and description character limits: there is no single global figure, because those constraints are published per product type and per marketplace through Amazon’s Product Type Definitions API rather than as a table. And whether eBay UK has reconciled its two pages: the private-seller fees page predates the Buyer Protection fee launch and does not mention it, so the exact interaction between the two is stated here from the Buyer Protection page alone.

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