Cardmarket vs Whatnot: fees and fit for selling trading cards
Cardmarket is a fixed-price card catalogue. Whatnot is live auction selling. Here is what each one costs, who can sell where, and which cards suit which site.
- Cardmarket is a fixed-price catalogue: you set a price and condition for a specific card and wait for a buyer to find it. Whatnot is mostly live auctions: you go on camera and sell to whoever is watching.
- Cardmarket charges commission on the sale (5% for private sellers, less for Professional and Powerseller accounts) plus a small trustee fee on protected orders.
- Whatnot charges around 8% commission in the US, Canada and Australia, or roughly 6.67% in the UK and EU, plus a card processing fee on every order.
- Cardmarket suits bulk commons and playset filler that sell one at a time over weeks. Whatnot suits chase cards, graded slabs and boxes that do better with a crowd bidding against each other on camera.
- With FLUF Connect you can list to Whatnot, but Cardmarket needs the FLUF browser extension for a different reason: FLUF cannot see when a Cardmarket card sells or end the listing itself, so you handle that side by hand. FLUF Connect costs 7 days for £1, then from £9/month.
Cardmarket and Whatnot are built for opposite selling habits. Cardmarket is a searchable price list: a buyer looks up a specific card, sorts by price and condition, and buys from whoever is cheapest. There is no bidding and no show to run. Whatnot is a live stream with an auction clock: you hold cards up to a camera, buyers bid, and the price is whatever the room will pay that night. Neither one refuses trading cards, so the choice for a card seller in Europe is about how you want to spend your time, not whether your stock fits.
Cardmarket and Whatnot side by side
| Cardmarket | Whatnot | |
|---|---|---|
| Format | Fixed-price catalogue listings | Live auctions, Buy It Now and giveaways |
| Commission | 5% private / lower for Professional and Powerseller, capped per article | About 8% (US/Canada/Australia) or 6.67% (UK/EU), varies by category |
| Extra seller fee | Trustee service fee on protected orders | Card processing fee on every order |
| Where buyers find you | Search by exact card, set and condition | Live show discovery, plus a Profile Shop |
| Time commitment | List once, sell over days or weeks | Go live and sell in a single session |
| Who can sell | Germany and other European countries, with country checks at signup | A set list of countries including the UK, Ireland is not included, and several EU states |
Which cards suit which site
Cardmarket rewards patience and depth. If you have thirty near-mint copies of a playset staple, or a long tail of commons from old sets, listing them once and letting the catalogue do the work costs you almost no time per card. The Cardmarket new user guide explains that buyers search for a card, then sort every seller’s offer by price and condition on one page. Your card competes on price against everyone else holding the same card in the same grade, so bulk commons and reliable staples are where Cardmarket earns its keep.
Whatnot rewards a card that can start a bidding war. A rare pull, a graded slab, a sealed box or a themed lot gives a live audience something to compete over, and Whatnot’s own newsroom has said trading cards and sports cards are among its biggest categories by order volume. A £2 common gets lost in a fast-moving show; a chase card or a break gets attention. If your box has both, expect to run some cards through a show and list the rest on a catalogue site instead.
What a sale costs you on each site
Cardmarket commission and trustee fee
Cardmarket charges commission based on seller level, taken from the item price only, not the postage you charge, and capped per article. Private sellers pay around 5%, with lower rates for Professional and Powerseller accounts, according to fee guides that reference Cardmarket’s own fee table. On top of that, the Trustee Service holds payment until the buyer confirms the parcel arrived, and charges a small fee based on order value for that protection. Cardmarket’s help centre says registered, trackable shipping is required for any order worth more than €25, for higher-value orders from new sellers, and for anyone with too many parcels in transit or a loss rate above 2%.
Cross-border sales bring VAT into it. Cardmarket’s tax requirements page says the platform collects VAT itself on some cross-region orders, including a €150 EU consignment threshold and a £135 UK threshold, and applies an 8.1% VAT charge on everything shipped into Switzerland and Liechtenstein, regardless of seller status.
Whatnot commission and processing fee
Whatnot’s seller fees page sets commission at around 8% for most categories in the US, Canada and Australia, and around 6.67% in the UK and the EU countries it operates in, dropping at higher lifetime sales tiers. Coins and money categories sit lower, at around 4%. On top of commission, Whatnot charges a card processing fee of about 2.9% plus $0.30 per order in the US, Canada and Australia, or around 2.42% plus €0.25 or £0.25 plus VAT in the UK and EU. There is no fee to create a listing or start a show.
Whatnot has also run a promotion removing commission on the part of a high-value order over $1,500 in categories that include trading cards, so a single expensive slab can cost noticeably less in commission than a run of cheaper cards adding up to the same total.
A worked example: a €80 card
- Cardmarket, private seller: 5% of €80 is €4. If the order is protected by the Trustee Service, a further fee of roughly 0.5% to 1% of the order value applies. You keep close to €75, minus your own postage.
- Whatnot, UK show: commission at 6.67% of €80 is about €5.34, plus the processing fee of roughly 2.42% plus €0.25, which adds around €2.19. You keep close to €72.50 before your own packaging costs.
The gap narrows on bigger cards and widens on small ones, because both platforms’ per-order fixed charges matter more at low prices.
How buyers find your cards
Cardmarket search works by card identity first. A buyer picks a game, searches a card name, and Cardmarket shows every seller’s offer for that exact card sorted by price and shipping cost, with filters for language, condition and seller type. You are not building an audience, you are competing on price against every other seller of that card in that grade.
Whatnot’s listing help page describes three formats: Buy It Now at a fixed price, Auction with bidding during a live show, and Giveaways. Buy It Now items sit in your Profile Shop, which buyers can browse any time, while auction items are tied to a specific live show. Selling well on Whatnot leans on being found through shows and building repeat viewers, which is a different skill to pricing a catalogue listing correctly.
Cardmarket buyers also have a Shopping Wizard, which searches for several cards on a want list at once and can favour either the lowest total price or the fewest separate parcels. A collector filling out a playset or a full set checklist can run that tool instead of hunting for each single card by hand, which is another reason bulk staples do well on Cardmarket: the buyer’s own tools are built for exactly that kind of order.
Who can sell where
Cardmarket’s help centre lists “my country is not available when signing up” as a real question sellers ask, so registration is checked by country rather than open to anyone worldwide. Its own guidance references sellers across the EU, plus the UK, Switzerland, Norway and Liechtenstein, with Germany-based professional sellers required to hold a VAT ID and other EU professionals only needing one to sell across borders, from the Professional Seller Guide.
Whatnot’s seller location and currency page names the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Japan, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands as approved seller locations, and it requires your bank account’s country and currency to match the country you registered from. A European seller outside that list, in Ireland or Spain for example, cannot register as a Whatnot seller today, while Cardmarket’s country coverage across Europe is wider.
Shipping and payouts
On Cardmarket you buy and print your own postage through your national postal service, and the shipping costs page says the platform calculates suggested shipping charges from your country, the buyer’s country, weight and your chosen service, updating them as postal rates change. Payment for an order that is not Trustee-protected reaches you once the buyer pays; a Trustee-protected order pays out once the buyer confirms delivery.
Whatnot generates prepaid shipping labels for sales inside the EU and to Switzerland, bundling multiple items from one buyer into the smallest package it can, and the label cost is built into the fees above rather than billed separately. Outside the EU and Switzerland, Whatnot sellers use Bring Your Own Label with a trackable service, since untracked shipping is not accepted. Once an order is confirmed delivered, earnings move to your available balance, and a bank transfer to your account follows on a schedule that depends on your country.
Going live versus listing once
Cardmarket’s time cost sits at listing: entering the card, condition and price once, and waiting. Whatnot’s time cost sits at the show. Whatnot approves sellers before they can go live, and once approved you run a session on camera, holding cards up, talking through pulls and taking live bids as the clock runs down. Trading cards are not a gated category on Whatnot, so no extra application is needed beyond the standard seller approval to start selling them.
That difference decides who each site suits. If you would rather price a card once and let it sell in the background, Cardmarket asks less of your week. If you enjoy hosting and can build a following, a Whatnot show can move a whole box in an evening at prices a catalogue listing would not reach.
How to split your stock
Put a card on Cardmarket when:
- it is a bulk common, a playset piece or reliable staple that many buyers already search for by name;
- you would rather set a price once than run a show;
- your buyer is in the EU, the UK or another country Cardmarket already covers.
Put a card on Whatnot when:
- it is a chase pull, a graded slab or part of a themed lot that benefits from live bidding;
- you can commit to hosting or joining a show;
- you are registered from one of the countries Whatnot currently accepts sellers from.
Many sellers run both: Cardmarket for the steady long tail, Whatnot for the cards worth making an event of.
Selling on Cardmarket and Whatnot with FLUF Connect
FLUF Connect lists your stock to Whatnot and to 53 marketplaces from one product record, so you are not retyping a title and condition on every site you use.
| What FLUF Connect does | Cardmarket | Whatnot |
|---|---|---|
| Notices a sale on this site and updates stock elsewhere | No | Yes |
| Ends this listing when the item sold on another site | No | Yes |
| Relisting (plans above Starter) | No | No |
| Offer management (plans above Starter) | No | No |
| Connection method | FLUF browser extension | FLUF browser extension |
Both channels need the FLUF browser extension to connect, but what happens after a sale is different. FLUF lists your items on Whatnot, notices when one sells there, and removes it from your other listings. Cardmarket works the other way: FLUF neither sees a Cardmarket sale nor ends a Cardmarket listing, so when a card sells there, you mark it sold in FLUF yourself, or close the Cardmarket listing by hand if it sold somewhere else first. If you already have live listings on either site, you can bring them into FLUF instead of starting again.
You can try it with 7 days for £1, then from £9/month. Starter includes unlimited listings, and crosslisting, inventory sync, order sync and bulk operations are part of every plan.
| Plan | Monthly | Crosslisted products |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | £9/month | Unlimited |
| Seller | £29/month | Unlimited |
| Pro | £99/month | Unlimited |
| Super Seller | Custom pricing — tell us what you need | Unlimited |
Sources
- Cardmarket: Our Fee Table
- Cardmarket: Trustee Service
- Cardmarket: Tax Requirements
- Cardmarket: Shipping Costs
- Cardmarket: New User Guide
- Cardmarket: Professional Seller Guide
- Whatnot: Whatnot seller fees
- Whatnot: Seller location and currency requirements
- Whatnot: Create product listings
- Whatnot: Set up shipping before you sell
- Whatnot: How to sell in Gated Categories
Sources checked September 2026.
Related guides
Frequently Asked Questions
It depends on the sale. Cardmarket charges around 5% commission for a private seller, capped per article, plus a small trustee fee on protected orders. Whatnot charges around 8% in the US, Canada and Australia or around 6.67% in the UK and EU, plus a card processing fee on every order. On a low-value card, Cardmarket usually costs less. On a high-value card during a promotion period, Whatnot's reduced commission above €1,500 can close the gap.
No. Whatnot currently approves sellers registered in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Japan, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands, and your bank account has to match that country and currency. If you are outside that list, you cannot register as a Whatnot seller yet, even though Cardmarket's country coverage across Europe is wider.
Most Whatnot sales happen through live auctions during a show, though Buy It Now listings in your Profile Shop can sell without a live show. Cardmarket needs no live element at all: you set a price and condition once and wait for a buyer to find the card in search.
On Cardmarket you buy your own postage through your national postal service, using the shipping cost estimate Cardmarket calculates. Whatnot generates a prepaid shipping label for sales inside the EU and to Switzerland, bundled into its fees, and sellers shipping further afield use their own trackable label through Bring Your Own Label.
Cardmarket suits bulk commons and playset staples that sell steadily to buyers searching for that exact card. Whatnot suits a rare pull, a graded slab or a themed lot that does better in front of a live audience bidding against each other.
No. FLUF neither detects a Cardmarket sale nor removes a Cardmarket listing, so you mark the card sold in FLUF yourself, or close the Cardmarket listing by hand. On Whatnot, FLUF notices the sale and removes the item from your other listings.
Yes. FLUF Connect lists your items on Whatnot alongside 50+ other marketplaces, using the FLUF browser extension to connect the account. You can try it with a 7-day trial for £1, then plans start from £9/month.
Cardmarket collects VAT itself on some cross-region orders, including consignments under €150 into the EU and £135 into the UK, and it applies an 8.1% VAT charge on everything shipped into Switzerland and Liechtenstein regardless of the seller's status. Whatnot's processing fee in the UK and EU is quoted plus VAT on top.