Gumtree Australia vs eBay — Fees, Reach and Which One to Sell On

On this page

• The short answer
• First, a thing people get wrong
• eBay Australia went free in May 2026
• Gumtree Pay, and what it does not cover
• The arithmetic, worked
• What listing on each is like
• Reputation: one platform has it, the other has none
• Which categories belong where
• Risk, in both directions
• Tax, and one widely repeated mistake
• What Australian sellers actually say
• The verdict
• Sources and verification

The short answer

If the item is bulky, heavy, fragile or unshippable — a couch, a fridge, a trailer, a load of pavers, a cot — list it on Gumtree Australia for local pickup. It is free, the buyer collects, and no carrier ever has to price a job that costs more than the item is worth.

If the item is small, postable and searched for by name — a specific part number, a coin, a card, a camera lens, an out-of-print book — list it on eBay Australia. As of 12 May 2026 a casual seller pays nothing to sell there, and eBay finds you buyers in Perth and Cairns that a Brisbane classified ad never will.

If you are selling a car, caravan or motorbike, Gumtree Australia is the one with the infrastructure. It is the company’s declared revenue engine and the only division that grew in FY25.

Most people clearing a house should use both. The categories that suit each barely overlap, and now that eBay’s casual tier costs nothing there is no fee reason to choose.

First, a thing people get wrong

Gumtree Australia and Gumtree UK are separate businesses. They share a name and a logo and nothing else — different companies, different owners, no shared login, no shared account, no shared seller base. An Australian seller cannot use a UK Gumtree account and a UK seller cannot use an Australian one.

The history explains it. eBay bought the Gumtree brand globally in 2005 and launched gumtree.com.au in 2007. The classifieds arm became Adevinta in 2021, and in August 2022 Adevinta sold Gumtree Australia, CarsGuide and Autotrader Australia to The Market Herald, an ASX-listed company based in Perth, for US$60 million. That business renamed itself Gumtree Australia Markets Limited and now trades on the ASX under the ticker GUM, headquartered in Sydney. The UK operation went elsewhere and stayed there.

This matters practically, not pedantically. Every fee figure, promotion price and policy on this page is the Australian one. If you find a Gumtree fee list online quoting pounds, you are reading about a different company.

Worth knowing what kind of business you are listing on: Gumtree Australia Markets reported half-year revenue of A$35.2 million to 31 December 2025, down 7%, with EBITDA up 23% and a small net profit after a prior-year loss. In February 2026 the board rejected a conditional takeover approach at A$0.132 a share. It is a small business back in profit through cost cuts — context for its bet on payments.

eBay Australia went free in May 2026

This is the single biggest change in Australian reselling economics this decade, and a lot of advice online has not caught up.

eBay Australia’s own fee page gives the date as 12 May 2026, though trade press reported it variously through late April and mid-May — if the exact day matters to you, check your own account. Under it, a seller meeting all three of the following pays no transaction fee and no per-order fee on eBay Australia: an Australian registration address, no Pro plan, and no more than A$25,000 of eBay sales in the past twelve months.

Read that threshold carefully, because eBay is explicit about it: the $25,000 is an eligibility test, not a fee-free allowance. It is recalculated monthly across the preceding twelve full calendar months, summed across every eBay site, on the total sale amount including postage and tax. Cross it and you are notified on the 20th and moved onto Pro Starter from the 1st of the following month.

What free selling includes: 250,000 free listings a month — a figure eBay Australia also publishes on its Seller Centre for every Pro tier. (The fee for listings beyond that allowance is quoted inconsistently across eBay’s own pages, so we are not stating one.) What it still costs you:

• 3% international sales fee when delivery is outside Australia — against 1.1% on any Pro plan. A serious exporter is genuinely better off subscribing.
• $24.20 per dispute.
• On-demand payouts only. No scheduled payouts at all — you request them, and your bank makes funds available in one to two business days. Pro sellers get daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly schedules. This is a real regression for casual sellers and they complain about it.
• You must generally buy your postage labels through eBay as a condition of free selling.
• Optional extras: listing in two categories $1.00, subtitle $2.20.

And the part that makes “free” a marketing word rather than an arithmetic one: non-Pro listings carry a Buyer Protection Fee of 4–8% of the item price, mandatory, paid by the buyer and included in the price they see. eBay confirms the range on its own Pro subscription page. Pro sellers’ listings include buyer protection at no cost to either side, which produces the odd result that a Pro seller’s item shows a lower total to the buyer.

An eBay seller put the consequence plainly in May 2026: “When you list the item it shows you the total price including buyer fee. So really if you want to competitively price your items then it’s the seller getting hit with another fee not the buyer. If I want to sell my item at $400 I now have to sell it at $385 for it to show up as ~$400.” Call it an effective 5–6% haircut on a competitively priced listing. Still dramatically better than 13.4%. Not zero.

If you do cross the threshold, the Pro ladder runs: Pro Starter at $0 a month but a flat 13.4% across every category plus $0.30 an order; Pro Basic at $27.45; Pro Featured at $82.45; Pro Anchor at $604.95. Only Basic and above get the category tiers. eBay Australia’s Seller Centre gives them as 8.0–13.1% on Basic, 7.3–11.8% on Featured and 6.82–11.11% on Anchor — the low end being technology devices and the high end fashion, collectables and media. Pro Starter’s flat 13.4% is the worst rate on the board — if you are going to be pushed onto Pro at all, do the sums on Basic.

Gumtree Pay, and what it does not cover

Gumtree Australia used to be a noticeboard. As of 2026 it also has payments, shipping and buyer protection, and the pricing is startlingly good.

The seller pays 0.5%, minimum 50 cents, capped at $7.50. A $500 sale costs you $2.50. Anything above $1,500 costs $7.50 and no more. The buyer pays a 1.5% card surcharge, or nothing on PayTo bank transfer during the introductory period, plus a 0.5% platform fee with a $1 minimum and the same $7.50 cap, waived entirely for first-time customers.

Mechanically: the seller hits Request Payment inside Gumtree Messages; the buyer pays by card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal or PayTo; the seller must pass identity verification and link a transactional Australian bank account. Payouts land in three to five business days, or on buyer confirmation for shipped items. Shipping is booked in the same flow with an approved carrier, and AfterShip provides tracking. The seller has three days from payment to ship and add tracking or the order auto-cancels; the buyer then has three days to inspect.

The Protected Shipping policies took effect in June 2026, and the seller-side protections are real. Funds are held until delivery is confirmed. Gumtree supplies proof of fulfilment against non-delivery chargebacks. And the policy states that if a buyer claims an item is significantly not as described but Gumtree’s evaluation of the photographs and the original listing shows the claim is false, the payout is released to the seller.

Now the catches, and they are not small ones.

• Cover applies to items of $1,000 or less. Above that you are on your own.
• Transit loss and damage are not covered. The policy says so in capitals. You can do everything right and still eat the refund if the courier loses it.
• Use an approved carrier booked inside the Shipping feature, or you lose everything. Gumtree is explicit: shipping through a different provider, or through a supported provider outside the feature, results in loss of all buyer and seller protections.
• Pickup and off-platform payment carry no protection whatsoever — no cover for bank transfer, PayID, PayPal outside the app or cash in a driveway. That is still how most of Gumtree works.
• On a not-as-described claim the seller may have to fund return postage; refuse, and the buyer can be refunded without returning the item.
• Excluded outright: custom-made goods, art and collectables, perishables, digital goods, hygiene-sensitive items and hazardous materials.

And the honest scale note. As at 31 December 2025 Gumtree Pay had reached its first 1,000 transactions, with goods transacted exceeding A$100,000 in a single month. That is a real product with real pricing at a very early stage. Treat it as a capability, not as how Gumtree works today.

For everything else, Gumtree Australia remains free. Most categories cost nothing to list in and there is no limit on how many ads you post. Three categories always charge: Pets and Animals, Cars/Vans and Utes, and Caravans and Campervans — though private sellers in New South Wales, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the ACT get a free Basic car listing. Boats and Jetskis, Real Estate, some Jobs categories and Services for Hire give you one free ad and charge thereafter.

One genuine transparency problem: Gumtree Australia publishes no promotion prices anywhere. Bump Up, Top Ad, Homepage Gallery, Urgent, Highlight, Price Drop, Featured and Spotlight all exist, with durations from three to twenty-one days, but every help page says the price depends on the promotion, the category and your location, and shows it only inside the posting flow. We are not going to invent a number, and neither should anyone else — every priced list we found online turned out to be the UK site.

The arithmetic, worked

General merchandise, collected locally on Gumtree unless stated. Postage is excluded from the eBay fee base for clarity — note that eBay’s fees are actually charged on item plus postage plus tax, so a real eBay bill is higher whenever you charge for delivery. The Buyer Protection Fee tiers used here are as widely reported rather than confirmed on eBay’s own page.

A $100 sale

A $500 sale

Three things fall out of those tables. On both fee-free paths, the seller-side arithmetic is a tie at zero — the difference is entirely what the buyer is shown. Gumtree’s zero is a genuine zero with genuinely zero recourse. And Pro Starter, at a flat 13.4%, is the expensive option nobody chooses deliberately — you get moved onto it by crossing a threshold.

What listing on each is like

eBay’s postage integration is the underrated part of that table. Up to 35% off Australia Post domestic rates, up to 20% off international, 40% off Extra Cover insurance, and printerless QR-code labels the post office scans and prints for you — which covers PO boxes, parcel lockers and rural drop-off. Published flat-rate satchel pricing starts at $6.63 for a Zone 1 extra-small Parcel Post. For a seller shifting volume, that discount is worth more than most promotion products.

One Gumtree rule that catches people: the General Posting Policy bans phone numbers, email addresses and external links in the description text and in message replies. A phone number in the structured phone field is fine. The same number typed into your ad copy can get the ad pulled.

Reputation: one platform has it, the other has none

This is the deepest structural difference between them and it rarely appears in comparisons.

Gumtree Australia has no seller rating system. No feedback score, no defect metric, no standards regime, no consequence. The only identity check anywhere in the funnel is the KYC you pass to use Gumtree Pay. That cuts both ways: no compliance overhead to worry about, and no way for a genuinely good seller to signal it.

eBay Australia has all of it, and it has teeth. Sellers are evaluated on the 20th of each month over the last three months if they have done more than 400 transactions, or the last twelve months otherwise. To stay Above Standard you need a transaction defect rate no higher than 2%, and no more than two cases closed without seller resolution (or 0.3% of transactions, whichever is higher). Notably, late shipment rate has no minimum requirement — a high rate alone will never make you Below Standard.

Fall to Below Standard and, immediately, your items are placed lower in Best Match and your selling limits may drop. From the 1st of the following month you pay an extra 5.5%, rising to 6.6% after four or more consecutive months — an escalation new from 1 August 2026. You also lose access to Promoted Listings General, which requires Above Standard. There is a sensible safeguard: you are only rated Below Standard on defects involving more than four different buyers.

Top Rated status requires a defect rate at or below 0.5% across no more than three buyers, a late shipment rate at or below 5%, an account active at least 90 days, and at least 100 transactions and A$1,000 of sales in the last twelve months. It carries no fee discount in Australia — only a badge. Do not import US advice on this point; the US 10% final-value-fee discount does not exist here.

Which categories belong where

Risk, in both directions

The clean framing: on Gumtree the seller carries fraud risk before the money moves. On eBay the seller carries claim risk after it has moved.

The National Anti-Scam Centre’s Targeting Scams 2025 report, published in March 2026, found shopping scams were the number one scam type by the number of people reporting a financial loss: 12,248 Australians reported losing $10.8 million, up 22.2% year on year. One caveat that matters and is usually dropped — the report’s own footnote says that category combines online shopping scams and classified scams, and no standalone classifieds figure is published. Do not let anyone tell you $10.8 million was lost on classifieds.

Gumtree is named in the 2024 edition as a data-sharing partner, receiving daily suspected scam advertisement IDs, of which 310 were referred for further investigation.

The best-documented attack on Australian classifieds sellers is the PayID “business account” scam. A buyer contacts you, does not haggle, often says a relative will collect, and pushes PayID. Once you give your PayID they claim the payment failed because you lack a PayID business account, say they have paid to upgrade it, and ask you to reimburse the fabricated fee — with convincing fake bank and PayID emails as evidence. NAB’s two lines are the ones to remember: there are never any charges related to using PayID, and if you get an email, text or message directly from “PayID”, it is a scam. Banks register and manage PayIDs; PayID never contacts users.

The eSafety Commissioner also documents the courier scam (a buyer who cannot collect asks you to pay a courier upfront against a reimbursement that never comes), the overpayment scam, and fake payment confirmations — with the specific warning not to rely on emailed receipts, even ones that appear to be from PayPal. Check inside your own account.

Worth flagging: Gumtree’s own scam education page lists only four buyer-facing tactics and does not mention the PayID business-account scam, courier scams, overpayment or fake payment confirmations — that is, it omits the best-documented scams run against its own sellers.

eBay’s risk is the mirror image. Under the Money Back Guarantee a buyer is covered for 30 days from delivery where an item does not arrive or is damaged, faulty or not as described. The seller must respond within three business days; eBay steps in after 21. Where there is no delivery proof to the checkout address, or the seller offers no return solution, eBay refunds the buyer and invoices the seller. Add the $24.20 dispute fee and the fact that unresolved cases feed the defect rate, which feeds Below Standard, which costs 5.5% and a Best Match demotion. Seller protections do exist — you can challenge fraudulent claims, and buyers lose coverage for abusive behaviour or duplicate chargeback claims — but the structural exposure is real.

Tax, and one widely repeated mistake

General information, not advice, and worth an accountant if you are near any of these lines.

The Sharing Economy Reporting Regime does not capture ordinary goods sales on either platform. This is repeated wrongly all over the internet, so here is the primary source. Treasury’s explanatory memorandum states that “transactions that only involve the sale of goods or real property (the transfer of legal title to the goods or real property) or financial supplies are not intended to be captured by the reporting regime”, and that transactions involving the rental of goods are captured. Selling your old couch is a permanent transfer of ownership. It is out of scope on both platforms.

Separately, the thresholds that do matter to an Australian seller:

• GST registration at $75,000 of turnover ($150,000 for non-profits).
• Personal use assets: no capital gains tax unless the asset cost you more than $10,000 to acquire. Boats, furniture, electrical goods and household items are the ATO’s own examples. Capital losses on personal use assets are ignored entirely.
• Collectables: the threshold drops to $500. Artwork, jewellery, antiques, coins, medallions and rare books acquired for more than $500 are within CGT, and losses on collectables can only offset gains on collectables. That is a genuinely under-reported point, and it lands squarely on the categories that favour eBay.

On hobby versus business, business.gov.au is blunt that “there is no single factor that determines if you are in business” — it looks at profit intention, repetition, scale, and whether you conduct yourself in a businesslike way. A hobby seller does not declare the income and cannot claim deductions; a business does both, generally needs an ABN, and without one other businesses must withhold 47%. If you are genuinely unsure, the ATO offers a private ruling that protects you from penalties and interest.

What Australian sellers actually say

Start with a warning about the numbers. On the app stores both platforms sit at 4.6 to 4.7 stars — Gumtree’s Australian iOS listing shows 4.72 from over a million ratings. On ProductReview.com.au, where reviews are written rather than tapped, Gumtree scores 2.0 from 1,844 reviews and eBay scores 1.4 from 3,226 reviews, 87% of them negative. App-store stars are dominated by prompted in-app rating taps. They are not sentiment.

The dominant Gumtree complaint is not fees — it is that the audience left. From a 443-point thread on r/australia in June 2025: “Gumtree died ages ago, everyone uses Facebook marketplace now.” A December 2025 thread blamed the commercial takeover: “they allowed those used car dealers to take over the platform. all ads are flooded with them.”

There is a real counterpoint from a January 2026 thread: “There’s plenty more real buyers on gumtree than there are on marketplace, but marketplace has exponentially more exposure. The search filters actually work on gumtree.”

eBay’s complaints are about money and about being second-guessed. From ProductReview in mid-2026: “Sale $267 – payout $183!!!” And on the free-selling change, from the r/eBay subreddit in May 2026: “They HAVE no choice but to pay the fee. It’s expensive so all your items just went up a lot. You have to request your money now, it’s not automatically paid out. Apparently you must use their eBay post labels.” A buyer in the same thread: “bought a laptop for $1650 and got charge $76.70 buyer protection fee lol.”

One honest note on the Gumtree score: its ProductReview rating rose from about 1.5 to 2.0 over a short period with roughly 114 new reviews, nearly all four and five star and all describing successful sales. That pattern is consistent with active review solicitation. Treat 2.0 as a rising floor rather than organic sentiment — and treat the Trustpilot score of 4.5 the same way, since those reviews are invited after a transaction and therefore ask only the sellers who succeeded.

The verdict

Choose Gumtree Australia if the item is bulky, heavy or unshippable; if you are selling a car, caravan or motorbike; if you want zero fees, zero paperwork and cash in hand and you accept there is no recourse; if you are advertising a job or a service; or if you are in New South Wales, Tasmania, the Northern Territory or the ACT selling a car privately, where you get a free listing that other states must pay for.

Choose eBay Australia if the item is small, postable and specific; if you sell under A$25,000 a year and can therefore sell without a transaction fee; if you want escrowed payment, discounted Australia Post labels and a real dispute process, and accept 30-day Money Back Guarantee exposure in return; if you want cross-border demand (checking the fee — 3% international on the casual-seller tier against 1.1% on Pro); or if you want a reputation that compounds, accepting that Top Rated in Australia buys a badge and not a discount.

Use both if you are clearing a mixed household, which most people are. Bulky to Gumtree for local pickup, postable to eBay’s casual-seller tier. Now that neither charges a casual seller a transaction fee, there is no fee argument for choosing, only a logistics one.

One caveat to carry with you: eBay’s casual-seller tier is a land grab against Facebook Marketplace, funded by buyers, and Gumtree has bet on a payments product that had done a thousand transactions in total as of December 2025. Both of these will change again. Check your own payout screen before you price anything.

Sources and verification

Every figure was checked against a primary source on 28 August 2026, and where a platform does not publish something we say so rather than borrowing a number from elsewhere.

• eBay Australia free selling, eligibility and the $25,000 threshold — eBay Australia selling fees without a Pro plan, page updated 15 June 2026
• eBay Pro plan subscriptions and category fee tiers — eBay Pro selling fees
• Buyer Protection Fee range of 4–8% — eBay Australia Pro subscription. The precise tier breakdown is widely reported but is not published on eBay’s own page, so we have labelled it as reported.
• eBay seller standards, the 5.5% and 6.6% adjustments and Top Rated criteria — Seller standards policy, updated 16 June 2026
• eBay Money Back Guarantee — eBay Australia, updated 19 August 2026
• eBay payouts, including on-demand-only for non-Pro sellers — Getting paid; photo limits — Adding pictures; postage discounts — eBay and Australia Post
• Gumtree Australia listing fees by category, ad duration, photo limits and posting rules — Gumtree Australia help centre
• Gumtree Pay fees and mechanics — Gumtree Pay service fees and the Payments FAQ
• Protected Shipping policy, the $1,000 cap and the transit-damage exclusion — seller policy, effective June 2026
• Adevinta’s sale of Gumtree Australia to The Market Herald — Adevinta press release, August 2022
• National Anti-Scam Centre, Targeting Scams 2025 — full report
• PayID scam mechanics — NAB via Savings.com.au; courier, overpayment and fake-receipt scams — eSafety Commissioner
• Sharing Economy Reporting Regime scope — Treasury explanatory memorandum; hobby versus business — business.gov.au
• Seller sentiment — ProductReview.com.au: Gumtree and eBay, plus public threads on r/australia and the r/eBay subreddit

What we checked ourselves. eBay Australia’s help pages sit behind a bot challenge, so we verified the Pro ladder directly against eBay Australia’s own Seller Centre in a browser on 28 August 2026: no monthly fee on Pro Starter at a flat 13.4% final value fee, $27.45 on Basic, $82.45 on Featured and $604.95 on Anchor, a 250,000 free-listing allowance on every tier, and the Buyer Protection fee shown as “included at no additional cost to your buyer” on Pro plans — which is what confirms that a non-Pro seller’s buyer does pay it. The free-selling eligibility threshold of A$25,000 and the exact commencement date come from eBay’s own fee page rather than from our own reading of it.

Three things we deliberately did not publish. We quote no eBay Australia user or visit figure, because no primary Australian source for one could be obtained — the numbers circulating are third-party estimates. We quote no Gumtree Australia promotion price, because Gumtree publishes none and every priced list we found was the UK business. And we make no claim about how Gumtree Australia compares to Facebook Marketplace by audience, because no Australian measurement service ranks them against each other — Marketplace is measured inside Facebook’s total, not as a standalone property.

Related guides

• Sell on Gumtree Australia — the full seller guide
• Sell on eBay — fees, formats and seller standards
• Crosslist from Gumtree Australia to eBay
• Crosslist from Gumtree Australia to Vinted
• Crosslist from Shopify to Gumtree Australia
• All marketplace guides