Subito vs eBay (2026) — What Changes for Italian Sellers on 1 September
From 1 September a private seller registered in Italy pays eBay nothing, and eBay's buyer fee is cheaper than TuttoSubito's. For a partita IVA, nothing changes at all. Here is the full comparison, worked.
- On 1 September 2026 the main reason to skip eBay disappears. From that date a private seller registered in Italy or France pays nothing; the buyer pays a Buyer Protection fee instead. A private seller then nets the same €50 on eBay as on Subito.
- And eBay’s buyer fee is the cheaper of the two. On a €50 item the eBay buyer pays €2.70 and the TuttoSubito buyer pays €3.70. At €300 it is €12.70 against €16.20.
- None of that helps a business seller. With a partita IVA, eBay still takes 6.5% to 12.5% by category plus €0.35 an order and a 0.35% regulatory fee, while Subito takes nothing on the sale at all.
- Subito publishes two different versions of its own buyer fee. The TuttoSubito terms say €1.20 + 5% capped at €91.20; the general conditions say €1 + 5% capped at €51. Both documents are live. We use the service-specific figures and flag the discrepancy rather than pick one silently.
- DAC7 sees the two platforms very differently. Subito reports only sales made through TuttoSubito — a cash pickup is invisible to it. eBay runs managed payments and sees every sale.
- Scale is not comparable and we will not pretend it is. Subito reports 26 million monthly users, all Italian. eBay reports 136 million active buyers worldwide. Nobody publishes eBay’s Italian buyer count.
- Cost: FLUF Connect crosslists to 45 marketplace channels from one dashboard. £1 for 7 days, then plans from £9/month (Starter). There is no free plan.
On this page
- The 1 September 2026 change, and exactly what it says
- Two platforms built for different transactions
- What Subito costs, and who pays it
- What eBay Italy costs, private and professional
- A €50 item, five ways
- Category by category: where each actually wins
- What happens when it goes wrong
- Scale: the honest comparison and the one nobody can make
- DAC7, and the difference between the two platforms’ visibility
- When a private seller becomes a business
- Verdict: which, and when both
- Sources and verification
- Related guides
The 1 September 2026 change, and exactly what it says
This comparison would have had a different answer a month ago, so start with what changes.
eBay’s Italian help pages state that from 1 September 2026, when a private seller with a registered address in France or Italy lists an item, a Buyer Protection fee is added to the listing price and paid by the buyer to eBay. The structure, on the item price only with shipping excluded and 22% Italian VAT included:
| Portion of the item price | Buyer Protection fee |
|---|---|
| Fixed, per item | €0.10 |
| Up to €20 | 7% |
| €20.01 to €300 | 4% |
| €300.01 to €4,000 | 2% |
| Above €4,000 | 0% |
eBay applies it automatically to eligible listings already live on the day, and tells sellers to take no action and not to change their prices. Classified Ad listings — “Contatto Diretto” — Veicoli and certain Imbarcazioni categories are excluded. Refunds return the fee to the buyer proportionally. Professional sellers are unaffected: their buyers pay nothing extra and protection stays included.
The mirror-image clause, that private sellers stop paying, sits in the new ebay.it User Agreement effective the same day: “Se sei un venditore privato e l’indirizzo associato al tuo account si trova nello Spazio Economico Europeo, non pagherai alcuna tariffa sulle transazioni” — if you are a private seller and the address on your account is in the European Economic Area, you will pay no transaction fees.
We are treating the buyer-side fee as settled, because eBay documents it on a help page in its own name. We are treating the seller-side removal as announced rather than in force, because it appears in the User Agreement and, as far as we can find, nowhere else — and eBay’s Italian seller-fee page still carried the old schedule when we read it on 30 August 2026. Say “as announced”, not “as shown on the fee page”, until that page updates.
Two platforms built for different transactions
Before the money, the shape. Subito and eBay are not competing for the same sale as often as a fee table implies.
Subito is a national classifieds board. Founded in Milan in 2007 and part of Adevinta, it runs 38 categories including motors, real estate and jobs, and reports 26 million monthly unique users and 13 million ads online each day. The archetypal Subito transaction is local: a sofa, a washing machine, a car, arranged by message and completed in person with cash. Nothing about that transaction generates a fee for anybody.
There is a corporate footnote worth knowing, because it surprises people. eBay was a substantial shareholder in Adevinta, Subito’s parent, and sold a 22% stake for $2.4bn when the Permira and Blackstone-led take-private closed on 29 May 2024, retaining a smaller holding. These are not entirely unrelated companies.
eBay is a shipped-commerce marketplace. The archetypal transaction is a specific object found by search and posted to somebody who may be four hundred kilometres away, with structured buyer protection and managed payments on both sides. Categories where a buyer exists somewhere but not locally — parts, collectibles, specific electronics, out-of-print anything — are where it wins outright, because Subito’s local audience simply does not contain that person.
Read the rest of this page with that in mind. The fees matter most in the overlap, which is shippable consumer goods of moderate value; outside the overlap the fee comparison is close to irrelevant.
What Subito costs, and who pays it
To the seller: nothing, in the ordinary case. Subito states that publishing an ad is free and there is no commission on the sale. Paid thresholds exist only in Nautica, Servizi and Attrezzature di lavoro. Per-category limits on free insertions do exist, but Subito’s help centre blocks automated reading, so we are not quoting numbers we could not verify.
Optional visibility is priced per ad, from Subito’s promotion page: Metti in vetrina from €0.60, Urgente from €0.70, Super boost from €0.90, Rimetti in cima from €0.95, and In evidenza from €3.99, which runs for seven days on the homepage and in similar-ad slots. Older guides quoting €2.60, €5 or €14.30 tiers are out of date.
TuttoSubito, the payment and shipping service, charges the buyer. Subito’s own line is that you sell without commission and the whole amount is transferred to your account. The buyer pays a service fee, the seller pays nothing on the sale.
Here we have to flag something rather than smooth it over. Subito publishes two different versions of that buyer fee in two live documents. The TuttoSubito terms give €1.20 plus 5% up to €300, €1.20 plus 4.5% above €300, capped at €91.20. The General Conditions give €1 plus 5%, €1 plus 4.5%, capped at €51. We use the TuttoSubito figures throughout, because they are specific to the service and appear to be VAT-inclusive, but a buyer quoting the other set is quoting Subito too.
Mechanically: shipping is always paid by the buyer, Subito supplies the label, and the seller drops the parcel at a Poste, InPost, BRT or UPS point — there is no home collection. Parcels run to 20 kg. Payment is held in escrow and released within three days of delivery to a bank account or PayPal, with automatic release if no dispute is raised within seven days of shipment. The processor is PayPal and Hyperwallet, and the service is private-to-private only.
What eBay Italy costs, private and professional
Private sellers, current schedule
Until the September change lands, an Italian private seller pays a final value fee of 5% of the total sale amount, falling to 2% on the portion above €2,000, plus €0.35 per order and a regulatory operating fee of 0.43% including VAT. There are 150 free listings a month, then €0.35 each; up to 24 photos are free; a subtitle costs €0.50 and a reserve 3%, with a €3 minimum and €150 maximum. A Negozio Base subscription is €19.95 a month with 250 free listings. Currency conversion is 3%, and international fees run 1.95% for non-euro Europe, 1.46% for the United States and Canada and 4.03% for the United Kingdom and rest of world.
Professional sellers
Unchanged by September, and this is the schedule that matters if you have a partita IVA. The final value fee is a category percentage plus €0.35 per order, net of VAT, with a 0.35% regulatory operating fee:
| Category | Final value fee |
|---|---|
| Elettronica — smartphones, TVs, laptops, consoles | 6.5% |
| Fumetti | 6.5% |
| Carte collezionabili | 6.5% to €990, then 2% |
| Accessori tech | 8.5% or 9.5% |
| Abbigliamento e accessori, Bellezza, Sport, Libri, Musica, Film, Videogiochi | 11% |
| Casa e arredamento, Infanzia, Hobby creativi | 11% |
| Scarpe | 11% to €100, then 5% |
| Borse | 11% to €990, then 2% |
| Gioielli | 11% to €990, then 4% |
| Orologi | 11% to €100, 5% to €990, then 2% |
| Giardino, Ricambi moto | 12% |
| Ricambi auto | 12.5% |
Negozio subscriptions for professionals run €24.95 a month for Base with 400 free fixed-price listings, €49.95 for Premium with 10,000, and €179.95 for Premium Plus with unlimited fixed-price listings. Top-rated sellers take 10% off the variable fee; accounts with very high “not as described” rates pay four percentage points more.
A €50 item, five ways
| Scenario | Seller nets | Buyer pays, excluding shipping |
|---|---|---|
| Subito, local pickup with cash | €50.00 | €50.00 |
| Subito via TuttoSubito | €50.00 | €53.70 |
| eBay private, from 1 September 2026 | €50.00 | €52.70 |
| eBay private, current schedule | €46.94 | €50.00 |
| eBay professional, Abbigliamento at 11% | €43.98 net of VAT | €50.00 |
Three things fall out of that table.
For a private seller, from September the platforms are financially identical — €50 either way — and eBay is actually the cheaper place for the buyer, by about a euro at this price and by €3.50 at €300. If your reason for avoiding eBay was its fees, that reason expires on 1 September.
For a professional seller, nothing has changed at all. eBay takes 11% of a €50 garment and Subito takes nothing. That is a real and permanent gap, and no amount of eBay’s better buyer protection closes it on price alone.
And Subito’s genuine remaining edge is the row at the top. Local pickup with cash: no fee, no packaging, no courier, no dispute window, no platform in the middle. For a wardrobe, a bicycle or a fridge, that is not a slightly better deal — it is a different and much simpler transaction, and it is why Subito will keep winning bulky goods regardless of what eBay does to its fee schedule.
Scale: the honest comparison and the one nobody can make
Subito reports 26 million monthly unique users, 13 million ads online daily and 2.8 billion searches over the past year, and describes itself as Italy’s leading re-commerce platform and second e-commerce platform — a claim sourced to a Casaleggio Associati study from 2024, so treat it as dated. Its harder, auditable figure, published under the EU Digital Services Act, is 15.3 million average monthly active recipients as at 30 June 2025. If you want one conservative number, use that one.
eBay reported 136 million active buyers in the twelve months to 30 June 2026, up around 2%, with $22.4bn of GMV and $3.1bn of revenue in the quarter, both up 15%.
Now the part most comparisons get wrong. Those two numbers do not compare. Subito’s users are Italian; eBay’s buyers are global, and eBay publishes no Italy-specific buyer count. We could not obtain Audiweb or Comscore rankings for Italy, so we are not going to tell you which is bigger in Italy — because we do not know, and neither does any page that asserts it without an Italian audience measurement to cite.
What can be said without hand-waving: Subito’s audience is entirely addressable by an Italian seller and largely local; eBay’s is mostly not in Italy, which is precisely the point of using it. You are not buying a bigger Italian audience from eBay. You are buying a national and cross-border one.
DAC7, and the difference between the two platforms’ visibility
This is the most consequential practical difference on the page and it is barely discussed anywhere.
DAC7, implemented in Italy by D.Lgs. 32/2023, requires platforms to report sellers of goods to the Agenzia delle Entrate once they exceed 29 transactions or €2,000 in a calendar year. The thresholds are alternatives, not cumulative — crossing either one is enough. Being reported is not the same as owing tax; it means the tax authority has your figures.
The two platforms see very different amounts of your activity. Subito’s terms state that it reports users who exceed the thresholds using the TuttoSubito service. A sale arranged by message and completed with cash in a car park never touches TuttoSubito and is therefore not visible to it. eBay, running managed payments, sees and can report every single sale.
The implication is not a loophole and should not be read as one — your tax obligation is identical either way, and understating income is understating income whoever reports it. The implication is that a seller who has been informally at scale on Subito for years may find that moving the same volume onto eBay produces their first ever DAC7 report, and should get their position straight before that happens rather than afterwards.
When a private seller becomes a business
Italian law sets no euro threshold at which a private seller becomes a business. The test is abitualità combined with organisation: habitual, organised activity carried on for profit is business income under art. 55 TUIR and requires a partita IVA under art. 4 DPR 633/72. Isolated, unorganised sales fall under redditi diversi at art. 67 comma 1 lettera i. Selling your own used possessions for less than you paid generally produces no taxable gain at all.
One number to actively distrust: the €5,000 figure that circulates constantly in Italian selling guides. It is the INPS gestione separata contribution threshold for occasional work, not a limit on how much you may sell. Anyone presenting it as a selling ceiling has misunderstood it.
What crosslisting changes is not the test but the evidence. Two platforms, consistent listing behaviour, repeat purchasing to resell — that pattern looks organised, because it is. Speak to a commercialista before you scale rather than after.
Category by category: where each actually wins
Fee tables imply the two platforms are interchangeable and they are not. Working through what Italians actually sell:
| What you are selling | Better platform | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Cars, motorbikes, campers | Subito, decisively | Motori is one of Subito’s largest sections. eBay’s Veicoli category is also excluded from the September Buyer Protection fee, which tells you how peripheral it is |
| Property and rentals | Subito only | eBay does not serve this at all |
| Sofas, wardrobes, white goods, garden equipment | Subito | Anything you would not post. Cash pickup means no packaging, no courier, no dispute window and no fee to anyone |
| Clothing and shoes, mid value | Either — try both | eBay professional takes 11%; Subito takes nothing but reaches only Italian buyers. The overlap category where the fee comparison genuinely decides it |
| Smartphones, laptops, consoles | eBay, narrowly | eBay’s Elettronica rate is 6.5%, its lowest, and buyer protection matters more to a buyer spending €400 on a used phone than a euro of fees does |
| Car and motorbike parts | eBay | Fitment-driven search finds the one person nationally who needs your part. At 12.5% and 12% these are eBay’s dearest categories, and still worth it because Subito’s local audience does not contain that buyer |
| Collectibles, comics, trading cards, out-of-print media | eBay | Fumetti and Carte collezionabili sit at 6.5%, and cross-border demand is the entire value. A rare item has no local market by definition |
| Watches, jewellery, designer bags | eBay for reach, with care | Tiered rates fall sharply above €100 or €990, so high-value items are cheaper proportionally than the headline 11% suggests |
| Services, work equipment, boats | Subito, but it costs | These are the three sections where Subito charges for insertion above a threshold rather than posting free |
The pattern underneath: Subito wins where the transaction is physical and local, eBay wins where the buyer is specific and distant. The fee difference only decides the middle band — shippable consumer goods between roughly €20 and €200 — which is exactly where most people are standing when they ask the question.
What happens when it goes wrong
Under-discussed, and it moves in the opposite direction to fees.
On Subito with a cash pickup there is no protection for anybody, because there is no platform in the transaction. The buyer inspects the item, hands over money and leaves. That is a feature for a sofa and a serious problem for a €400 phone. Through TuttoSubito, money is held in escrow and released within three days of delivery, or automatically if no dispute is raised within seven days of shipment, with full refunds for non-delivery, damage or not-as-described.
On eBay, protection is always on and always structured, which is what the buyer fee buys from September. Disputes run through a formal process, and the seller carries the risk of a not-as-described claim in a way a Subito cash seller simply does not. eBay also prices that risk back to you: an account rated Below Standard, or with a very high not-as-described rate, pays up to four percentage points more in final value fees.
So the honest reading is that Subito’s zero fees and eBay’s protection are the same trade seen from two ends. If you sell reliably and describe accurately, eBay’s machinery costs you a percentage and returns very little. If you sell items where condition is arguable and buyers are nervous — used electronics above all — that machinery is what makes the sale happen at all.
One asymmetry worth planning around: a Subito ad can be taken down at any moment with no consequence, and an eBay auction that has attracted bids cannot. If you crosslist one-of-one goods, use fixed-price listings on eBay rather than auctions, so that a Subito sale never leaves you unable to withdraw.
Verdict: which, and when both
Subito wins on bulky and local goods — furniture, appliances, garden equipment — on motors and real estate, which eBay Italy barely serves, and on anything where a cash pickup avoids packaging, postage and a dispute window entirely. For a professional seller its zero commission is a permanent, structural advantage that no eBay change touches.
eBay wins on anything shippable and searchable, on cross-border demand, on categories where the right buyer exists somewhere but not in your province, on structured buyer protection for both sides — and, from 1 September 2026 for private sellers, on costing the seller nothing while charging the buyer less than TuttoSubito does.
Most Italian sellers should run both, and the division of labour is fairly clean: local pickup on Subito, shipped items on eBay, with the overlap decided by whether the object is worth packing. The September change removes the last good reason for a private seller to skip eBay on cost. For a business with a partita IVA the calculation is genuinely unchanged, and the honest framing is that you are paying eBay 6.5% to 12.5% for demand Subito cannot reach — which is a fair trade when it is true and a waste when it isn’t.
One operational caveat if you do run both through FLUF Connect. eBay supports order sync, sold-detection, relisting and offer management. Subito supports none of them — it is a create-and-publish channel, it does not report sales back, and nothing will remove a Subito ad when the item sells on eBay. That is manual, every time, and for one-of-one second-hand goods it is the thing most likely to cost you a cancellation.
Sources and verification
- eBay Italia Buyer Protection fee — the 1 September 2026 change, the fee bands, the excluded categories and the automatic application to live listings.
- eBay Italia private seller fees — the current 5% final value fee, the €0.35 per order, the 0.43% regulatory fee, 150 free listings, 24 free photos, currency conversion and international fees.
- eBay Italia professional seller fees — the category final value fees, the 0.35% regulatory fee, Negozio subscription tiers, the top-rated discount and the not-as-described penalty.
- eBay Q2 2026 results — 136 million active buyers, $22.4bn GMV, $3.1bn revenue.
- Subito “Chi siamo” — 26 million monthly unique users, 13 million ads daily, 38 categories, founded Milan 2007, part of Adevinta, and the DSA monthly active recipients figure.
- Subito selling page and the posting-cost help article — free publication, no sale commission, and the paid categories.
- Vendilo Subito promotion prices — Metti in vetrina, Urgente, Super boost, Rimetti in cima and In evidenza.
- TuttoSubito terms and conditions and Subito’s general conditions — the two conflicting versions of the buyer service fee, the shipping and drop-off mechanics, the escrow window and payout timings, and the DAC7 clause limiting reporting to TuttoSubito sales.
- The Permira and Blackstone offer for Adevinta — the take-private under which eBay sold a 22% stake for $2.4bn, completing 29 May 2024.
- Italian tax law as published on Normattiva — art. 55 and art. 67 comma 1 lettera i TUIR, art. 4 DPR 633/72, and D.Lgs. 32/2023 implementing DAC7.
What we could not verify, and therefore left out. Subito’s per-category free-insertion limits, its ad duration, its photo limit per ad and what forces a seller onto a Pro account — the help articles exist but block automated reading, and we would rather say nothing than guess. eBay’s Italy-specific buyer or visitor numbers, which eBay does not publish, and the Audiweb or Comscore rankings that would settle which platform is larger in Italy. eBay’s current stake in Adevinta after the 2024 transaction. The 2026 regime forfettario ceiling. And the precise scope of the GPSR second-hand carve-out, which we could only find in secondary commentary rather than in the regulation’s own text.
Related guides
Frequently Asked Questions
From 1 September 2026, as announced. eBay's Italian help pages state that from that date a Buyer Protection fee is added to the listing price of items sold by private sellers registered in Italy or France, and paid by the buyer to eBay. The mirror clause — that private sellers in the European Economic Area pay no transaction fees — appears in the new ebay.it User Agreement effective the same day. We treat the buyer-side fee as settled because eBay documents it on its own help page, and the seller-side removal as announced rather than confirmed, because the Italian seller-fee page still carried the old schedule when we read it on 30 August 2026.
On the item price only, with shipping excluded and 22% Italian VAT included: €0.10 fixed per item, plus 7% of the price up to €20, 4% of the portion from €20.01 to €300, 2% of the portion to €4,000, and nothing above €4,000. So a €50 item carries €2.70. eBay applies it automatically to eligible listings already live on the day and tells sellers to take no action and not to change their prices. Classified Ad listings, Veicoli and certain Imbarcazioni categories are excluded.
Not in the ordinary case. Publishing an ad is free and there is no commission on the sale. Paid insertion thresholds exist only in Nautica, Servizi and Attrezzature di lavoro. Optional visibility costs extra per ad — Metti in vetrina from €0.60, Urgente from €0.70, Super boost from €0.90, Rimetti in cima from €0.95 and In evidenza from €3.99 for seven days. Through TuttoSubito the service fee is paid by the buyer, not the seller.
It depends which Subito document you read, and both are live. The TuttoSubito terms give €1.20 plus 5% of the purchase price up to €300, then €1.20 plus 4.5% above that, capped at €91.20. Subito's General Conditions give €1 plus 5%, €1 plus 4.5%, capped at €51. We quote the TuttoSubito figures throughout because they are specific to the service and appear to include VAT, but a buyer citing the other set is also quoting Subito. Either way the buyer pays it and the seller receives the full amount.
eBay, from September, at every price point we checked. On a €50 item the eBay buyer pays €2.70 in Buyer Protection while the TuttoSubito buyer pays €3.70. At €300 the gap widens to €12.70 against €16.20. That is a genuine reversal of the usual assumption, and it matters because a fee added at checkout affects conversion. The exception is a Subito cash pickup, where nobody pays anything to anyone.
No, not at all. The change applies only to private sellers. A professional seller on eBay Italy continues to pay a category final value fee of roughly 6.5% to 12.5% — 6.5% on Elettronica, 11% on Abbigliamento, 12% on Giardino, 12.5% on Ricambi auto — plus €0.35 per order and a 0.35% regulatory operating fee. Subito continues to take nothing on the sale. That gap is permanent and structural, and the honest way to think about it is that you are paying eBay for demand Subito cannot reach.
Nobody can answer that from published data, and pages that assert it are guessing. Subito reports 26 million monthly unique users, all Italian, and publishes a harder audited figure under the Digital Services Act of 15.3 million average monthly active recipients as at 30 June 2025. eBay reports 136 million active buyers, but that is worldwide and eBay publishes no Italy-specific buyer count. We could not obtain Audiweb or Comscore rankings for Italy, so we are not making the comparison. What is safe to say is that eBay's value to an Italian seller is national and cross-border reach, not a bigger Italian audience.
Both can, but they see different amounts of your activity, and this is the most practical difference between them. Under Italy's implementation, D.Lgs. 32/2023, a platform reports a goods seller to the Agenzia delle Entrate once they exceed 29 transactions or €2,000 in a calendar year — the thresholds are alternatives, so crossing either is enough. Subito's terms say it reports users who exceed the thresholds using the TuttoSubito service, so a sale arranged by message and completed in cash never reaches it. eBay runs managed payments and sees every sale. Your tax obligation is identical either way; the visibility is not.
No. Italian law sets no monetary threshold. The test is abitualità combined with organisation — habitual, organised activity carried on for profit is business income under art. 55 TUIR and requires a partita IVA under art. 4 DPR 633/72, while isolated unorganised sales fall under redditi diversi at art. 67 comma 1 lettera i. Selling your own used possessions for less than you paid generally produces no taxable gain. Distrust the €5,000 figure that circulates constantly: it is the INPS gestione separata contribution threshold for occasional work, not a limit on how much you may sell.
No — use fixed-price listings on eBay. A Subito ad can be withdrawn at any moment with no consequence, and an eBay auction that has attracted bids cannot be pulled cleanly. If the item sells locally through Subito while the auction is running, you are left unable to honour the winning bid. For one-of-one second-hand goods that asymmetry is the sharpest practical risk of running both, and it disappears entirely if you avoid the auction format.