TikTok Shop vs eBay (UK) — Fees, Second-Hand Rules and Who Each One Actually Suits

On This Page

• At a glance
• What each one takes
• eBay’s business fees, category by category
• Who you have to be to sell
• Second-hand: the real dividing line
• How buyers find you
• What a listing has to be
• Audience and scale
• Selling formats: eBay has three, TikTok Shop has one
• Reputation works differently, and costs differently
• Which one is right for what you sell
• Running both, and what FLUF does on each
• Pricing
• Sources & Verification

At A Glance

What Each One Takes

TikTok Shop is the simpler of the two to describe and the more expensive to use. Its UK Commission Rate Policy sets a standard rate of 9% of GMV, and the published formula is worth reading rather than skimming: the base is net sales plus customer-paid shipping plus platform discounts, minus refunds. Your postage is in the calculation.

Specified Electronics and Beauty & Personal Care categories carry an automatic four-percentage-point reduction, producing an effective 5%. Reductions do not stack — one per product at a time — so a seller can genuinely sit at 5% on an electronics line and 9% on a clothing line simultaneously. A full return refunds the commission; a partial refund returns only the proportion on the refunded items.

eBay is where it gets interesting, because the honest answer depends entirely on which kind of seller you are, and a great deal of published advice conflates the two.

UK private sellers pay nothing to sell. eBay’s own private-seller fee page states it directly: it is free for UK-based private sellers, excluding motors — no final value fees and no regulatory operating fee when items sell. You get 300 free listings a month, or 400 with a Shop subscription, and 35p per listing beyond that. Automatic renewals do not re-incur the fee or count against the allowance, though manual relists do.

Private sellers are not entirely fee-free. Optional listing upgrades still cost money — a subtitle at £2, Gallery Plus at £2.50, a reserve price at 4% of the reserve capped at £150, a second category at 35p — and there is a 3% international fee on the total sale where delivery is outside the UK.

Against a flat 9%, “nothing” is not a marginal difference. On a £40 item with £3 postage, TikTok Shop takes about £3.87 and eBay takes nothing from a private seller. That is the single largest fee gap between any two major UK channels, and it is the fact most worth knowing on this page.

eBay’s Business Fees, Category By Category

The comparison narrows considerably once you are a business seller, which — as the next section explains — you may have no choice about.

eBay’s business fees are a category percentage of the total sale, including postage and taxes, plus a per-order fee of £0.30 on orders of £10.00 or less and £0.40 above that, plus a regulatory operating fee of 0.35% of the total.

Read against TikTok Shop’s flat 9%, the picture inverts by category. Selling clothing as a business, eBay’s 11.9% plus the order fee and the 0.35% is meaningfully dearer than TikTok Shop’s 9% — even accounting for TikTok charging on postage. Selling phones, TVs, cameras or consoles, eBay’s 6.9% tapering to 3% or 2% on the portion above the threshold beats TikTok Shop comfortably, and beats it by more the higher the price.

Two multipliers can make eBay much worse. Sellers rated Below Standard pay an additional six percentage points, rising to seven after four consecutive months, and sellers with a very high rate of item-not-as-described claims pay a further four points, or five if sustained. Nothing on TikTok Shop’s published commission policy works like that, and it is a real risk for anyone running thin margins with variable stock.

Shop subscriptions change the listing arithmetic rather than the commission: Basic at £27 a month for 250 free fixed-price and 100 auction listings, Featured at £77 for 1,500 and 600, Anchor at £437 for unlimited fixed-price and 1,000 auction listings. Without a Shop, business sellers pay 30p per listing. Selling abroad adds an international fee of 1.05% for the Eurozone and Northern Europe, 1.8% for the US and Canada, and 2.0% elsewhere.

Who You Have To Be To Sell

This is the question that decides the fee comparison, and it gets far less attention than it deserves.

On eBay you can be a private individual. You sign up, you list, and if you are genuinely clearing out rather than trading, that status is legitimate and it is why the fees are zero. eBay is explicit that the free-selling arrangement is for private sellers.

On TikTok Shop there is no equivalent. Registration recognises Sole Trader and Corporate Seller and nothing else, which means selling there at all requires registering as a business — with the identity verification, the bank account in the business’s name, and the record-keeping that follows.

So the honest form of the fee comparison is conditional. If you are a genuine private seller, eBay is free and TikTok Shop is 9% and there is nothing more to discuss. If you are trading — and if you are reading a page comparing two sales channels, you probably are — then you are a business on both, and the comparison becomes the category-by-category one above.

It is worth adding that this classification is not really the platform’s to make. Platforms report seller data to HMRC under the digital platform reporting rules regardless of which label you chose for yourself, and the trading test is about what you are doing rather than which radio button you clicked.

Second-Hand: The Real Dividing Line

If you sell pre-owned goods, the fee tables above are almost beside the point.

eBay is the largest second-hand marketplace in the UK and has been for a quarter of a century. There is no application, no category gate, and no cap on what a used item may be listed for. Condition is a field, not a permission.

TikTok Shop treats second-hand as a restricted category. Its Restricted Products Policy states that all second-hand products may be sold only by sellers onboarded through a limited, invite-only process. The application asks for business background, the categories you propose, logistics information and links to your existing e-commerce stores.

Once approved, the rules are specific:

• Second-hand fashion listings must not exceed £500.
• Titles of used items must contain “Second-hand”, “pre-owned” or “pre-loved” — not required for new deadstock.
• A minimum of two images: at least one of the garment, and at least one showing the scratches, stretch marks or imperfections.
• Only new or new-with-tags underwear, socks and swimwear may be listed.
• Pre-owned electricals are limited to refurbished mobile phones, tablets, smart watches and laptops, also invite-only, requiring a UK Companies House number and a public Google or Trustpilot review page.
• Mystery and surprise listings are prohibited for second-hand goods.

Every one of those is a defensible consumer-protection rule. Collectively they mean that a used-goods business cannot simply decide to be on TikTok Shop, and that a £900 vintage coat has nowhere to go there at all. On eBay it is an ordinary listing.

How Buyers Find You

The fee comparison is arithmetic. This is the part that actually determines whether either platform works for you.

eBay is a search engine with a checkout. Somebody wants a specific thing, types it, filters by condition and price, and buys. Demand arrives already formed; your job is to be findable and credible — title keywords, item specifics, a competitive price, feedback. It rewards catalogue depth, because every additional listing is another query you can match. Saved searches and watchers mean a listing keeps working while you are asleep.

TikTok Shop is the opposite mechanism. Nobody searches TikTok for a beige cardigan. The recommendation feed decides who sees what, and the unit of work is a video. TikTok reported more than 6,000 LIVE shopping sessions a day in the UK, and the platform’s own content policy bans still-image videos precisely because the format demands real content rather than a slideshow of a product photo.

That difference has a cost implication nobody puts in a fee table. eBay’s 11.9% buys you distribution. TikTok Shop’s 9% buys you eligibility to be distributed, and the distribution itself has to be earned with content you make. For a seller who can make that content, the ceiling is far higher than eBay’s. For a seller who cannot, 9% buys very little.

What A Listing Has To Be

TikTok Shop’s listing requirements are stricter and more prescriptive than eBay’s. Images must be at least 800 × 800 pixels and square, with up to nine per listing, in colour, and free of pixelated blocks, text or watermarks other than product branding. Descriptions must run to at least 30 words. Titles may not carry promotional text, seller URLs or names, references to other platforms, or special characters.

The rule with the biggest structural consequence is one product per detail page, with duplicate listings disallowed. Sizes and colours must live as variants on a single listing. eBay permits both patterns — a multi-variation listing or separate listings — and many sellers deliberately run separate ones to occupy more search results.

Coming from eBay to TikTok Shop, that is work: five listings that are really one product in five sizes have to be merged. Going the other way it is a gift, because a consolidated variant tree is what every other system wants anyway.

eBay’s own listing discipline sits elsewhere — in item specifics, which drive its filters, and which are the single most under-invested field on the platform. A business listing with sparse item specifics is invisible to a shopper who filtered by brand and size, no matter how good the photographs are.

Audience And Scale

eBay reported 136 million active buyers and $22.4 billion of GMV for the three months ended 30 June 2026, up 2% and 15% respectively. eBay does not break buyers out by country, so treat that as a global figure — but it is a global figure attached to a marketplace where the UK is one of its oldest and deepest markets.

TikTok’s UK reach is documented by Ofcom rather than by TikTok. Online Nation 2025, published in December 2025 on Ipsos iris data, put TikTok at 27.3 million UK monthly visitors in May 2025 — 56% of UK online adults, up 14% year on year — with 10.4 million daily visitors and an average of 28 minutes a day. It is the tenth most-used smartphone app in the UK, reaching 46% of smartphone-using adults and 65% of 18-to-34s.

On the commercial side, TikTok reported more than 200,000 active small businesses selling on TikTok Shop in the UK in January 2025. There is no published UK GMV figure from TikTok or a named research firm, so this page does not quote one — and you should be wary of pages that do.

The demographic difference is the useful part. TikTok’s skew towards under-35s is not a small effect at 65% reach in that band, and it is the reason a product that dies on eBay can move hundreds of units on TikTok Shop in a week — and the reason the reverse happens with anything bought by someone over fifty who knows exactly what they want.

Selling Formats: eBay Has Three, TikTok Shop Has One

An underrated difference, and one that decides how you handle stock nobody wants at the price you first asked.

eBay gives you a fixed price, an auction, and Best Offer on top of either. The auction is the mechanism that has kept eBay relevant for a quarter of a century in categories where nobody actually knows what a thing is worth — a broken-boxed vintage camera, a lot of spares, a collectible with three plausible buyers. You do not have to price it correctly; you have to price the opening bid and let the market do the rest. Best Offer solves the adjacent problem of a fixed-price item that is nearly right, letting a buyer negotiate without you dropping the listed price for everyone.

TikTok Shop has fixed price. That is the whole list. A live show can carry a promotion, but there is no auction format and no structured negotiation, so mispriced stock simply sits — and on a recommendation feed, sitting is worse than on a search engine, because nothing is coming to look for it.

For anyone whose inventory is unpredictable, that single difference outweighs several points of commission.

Reputation Works Differently, And Costs Differently

On eBay, feedback is the asset and the liability. Years of it makes you credible to a cautious buyer comparing three identical listings, and losing it is expensive in a way the fee tables make explicit: Below Standard sellers pay six extra percentage points, seven after four consecutive months, and a very high item-not-as-described rate adds four more, or five if sustained. A bad quarter is not just embarrassing on eBay, it is a fee rise.

On TikTok Shop the equivalent currency is the account’s standing with the recommendation system, and it is far less legible. You cannot read it off a page, you cannot show it to a buyer, and it does not follow you if you start again. What you can see are the published performance thresholds, and the practical effect of falling foul of them is that reach quietly stops rather than that a number goes red.

Both are real constraints. eBay’s is measurable and priced; TikTok Shop’s is opaque and absolute. Which you prefer says a lot about which platform will suit you.

Which One Is Right For What You Sell

Choose eBay if you sell pre-owned goods of any real value, you sell things people search for by name or part number, your items are worth more than £500, your margins cannot absorb content production, or you are a genuine private seller — in which case the fee comparison is not close.

Choose TikTok Shop if you sell new stock, in a category with visual appeal, at a price point that survives 9%, and you can make video. It is the strongest top-of-funnel in UK e-commerce right now for exactly the sellers who can feed it, and it is close to useless for sellers who cannot.

Choose both if you have a catalogue of new goods that photographs well. This is most of the people asking the question, and it is why the framing of “which one” is usually the wrong question.

One planning note. Payment timing differs sharply: TikTok Shop settles from the delivery date on defined settlement periods, and new sellers begin on the slowest of them. If you fund stock from cash flow, that ladder can matter more to your business than a two-point difference in commission.

Running Both, And What FLUF Does On Each

The reason sellers pick one is rarely conviction. It is that maintaining two catalogues by hand is a job, and the second channel never quite earns the hours.

Two things on that table deserve emphasis rather than a footnote.

First, FLUF does not read orders from TikTok Shop. A sale there is not detected and will not reduce your stock elsewhere. Stock changes are pushed into TikTok Shop when something sells on another channel, but the return path is deliberately not claimed until it can be verified against real order data — because guessing at an order feed is how a tool mass-delists an entire catalogue on a bad assumption. If you run real stock levels, treat TikTok Shop as a channel you top up rather than one that reports back.

Second, FLUF’s TikTok Shop app is approved for the United Kingdom, so a seller outside the UK cannot complete that connection. eBay has no such restriction.

Both connect through official APIs, so neither needs a browser extension kept running — which is not true of every channel and is worth knowing if you have been put off crosslisting by tools that require a machine left on.

Pricing

FLUF Connect starts with 7 days for £1, with every feature available immediately. After that, plans start at £9/month for Starter, covering 300 active products, then Growth at £19/month and upwards by catalogue size. There is no free plan.

Every channel is included on every plan, and automation is included in every plan too rather than sold as an add-on — it works on the channels that support it, which here means relisting, offers and order sync on eBay, and stock pushes into TikTok Shop.

Sources & Verification

• TikTok Shop UK — Commission Rate Policy — 9% of GMV, the published formula including customer-paid shipping, the four-point reduction on specified Electronics and Beauty & Personal Care, the no-stacking rule and refund treatment. Policy dated 18 September 2025.
• TikTok Shop UK — Restricted Products Policy — second-hand goods invite-only; the £500 used-fashion cap; required title wording; the two-image minimum including an imperfection photo; the narrow pre-owned electricals list; the ban on second-hand mystery listings. Policy dated 19 August 2026.
• TikTok Shop — Best Practices for Product Listings — 800 × 800 square image minimum and up to nine images; 30-word description minimum; one product per detail page with duplicates disallowed; title restrictions.
• TikTok Newsroom (23 January 2025) — more than 200,000 active small businesses on TikTok Shop UK and over 6,000 LIVE shopping sessions a day.
• Ofcom — Online Nation 2025 (10 December 2025, Ipsos iris data) — 27.3 million UK monthly visitors, 56% of UK online adults, 10.4 million daily, 28 minutes a day, tenth most-used smartphone app, 46% adult reach and 65% among 18–34s.
• TikTok Shop Partner Center — developer guide — the documented Open API used by authorised third-party tools.
• eBay UK — fees for private sellers — free to sell for UK private sellers excluding motors; 300 free listings a month (400 with a Shop) and 35p thereafter; automatic versus manual relisting; the optional upgrade charges and the 3% international fee. Page last updated 1 October 2024.
• eBay UK — fees for business sellers — the category final value fee percentages, the £0.30 and £0.40 per-order fees, the 0.35% regulatory operating fee, the Below Standard and item-not-as-described surcharges, Shop subscription tiers and international fee rates. Page last updated 4 August 2026.
• eBay Inc. — Q2 2026 results (5 August 2026) — 136 million active buyers and $22.4 billion GMV for the three months ended 30 June 2026.
• GOV.UK — selling goods or services on a digital platform — the reporting rules platforms operate under and the trading test.

Last verified 22 August 2026. Both platforms change fees and policies without notice, and each page above carries its own update date; verify anything affecting a commercial decision.