Marketplace commission tells you nothing about your margin

A marketplace commission of 19.7% tells you nothing about what you keep

A marketplace commission of 19.7% tells you nothing about what you keep on a sale. On 20 August 2026 a survey of the ten largest marketplaces appeared in which Amazon is called the most expensive in the Netherlands: an average of 19.7% commission on Amazon NL, 11.2% at Cdiscount as the cheapest and 14.5% averaged across the marketplaces studied. Three numbers, neatly lined up. As a seller you cannot do anything with them.

There are two reasons for that. The first: platforms do not charge over the same basis. bol states on its own commission page that it calculates commission over the selling price including VAT, adds a fixed amount per item on top, and charges another 21% VAT over that commission. Amazon quotes its selling plan fees excluding VAT on its own pricing page. Putting two percentages side by side without levelling the basis produces a number that refers to nothing.

The second: an average tells you nothing about your item. Amazon writes itself that referral fees are in most cases between 8% and 15% of the selling price. What you pay depends on your category, and since January 2026 on your price point as well. That is exactly where money sits that you can move without changing anything about your product.

Below is why those percentages are not comparable and how you recalculate your own margin per marketplace. After that, where the price thresholds in Amazon's 2026 rates sit, and what that means for the way you set up your listing and your packaging.

One thing up front, so you know what you do and do not get here. We do not sell a verdict on which platform is cheapest, because that verdict does not exist independently of your category, your price point and your box size. What you do get is the calculation method, the ceilings to watch, and the place where most of the brands we work with leave money on the table without seeing it.

Why two commission percentages should not sit side by side

Because one percentage is charged over an amount including VAT and the other is not. That sounds like an accounting detail and it is a difference of almost a fifth in the denominator. At the high VAT rate, the price including VAT sits comfortably more than a fifth above the price you book as revenue. A commission of 6% over that gross price therefore weighs more heavily on your net margin than 6% sounds.

At bol that basis is stated in black and white. The commission page says literally that commission is charged over the selling price including VAT, and that as a business established in the Netherlands you pay 21% VAT over the commission bol invoices you. For a VAT registered business that VAT is deductible as input tax, so it touches your cash flow and not your margin. It does appear on your invoice, so it belongs in the right column of your spreadsheet and not in your margin calculation.

On the Amazon side the comparison looks different. Referral fees apply as a percentage of the selling price within a band of 8% to 15%. The fixed selling plan fees are listed explicitly excluding VAT alongside them: € 0.99 per item sold on the Individual plan or € 39 per month on the Professional plan.

Sources: the commission page of the bol partner platform and Amazon's pricing page for sellers.

Anyone who compresses these two columns into a single percentage throws away half the information. That is not a criticism of whoever makes such a comparison. It is the reason you have to check it yourself before you base a channel choice on it.

What does a sale of € 206.50 on bol really cost?

More than the rate quoted. bol publishes a worked example itself and that example is sharper than any external comparison. It concerns a pasta machine of € 206.50 in Kitchen Merchandise, with 6% variable commission plus € 0.85 fixed, together € 13.24 in commission.

Now our own calculation, because it is not on that page. That selling price includes VAT. Strip the VAT component and you are left with the revenue you actually book. Calculate the commission over that lower amount and you pay almost 8% of your revenue in commission, while the rate quoted is 6%. Almost a third higher than the percentage suggests.

Two things do the work in that table. The fixed amount per item is not part of the percentage, and that fixed amount weighs more heavily the cheaper your item is. On an item of 20 euros, 85 cents is already a serious bite, whatever percentage sits above it. And the VAT basis shifts the whole picture, whatever your category.

That fixed amount is also the reason cheap items rarely work on a marketplace the way you hope. The percentage scales with your price, the fixed amount does not. The lower your price, the harder that fixed component presses, and at some point the calculation tips over entirely. Brands usually solve that with bundles, and that is often the right move. Except a bundle also changes your box size, and with it your shipping rate. Two line items that can get in each other's way if you look at them separately.

For completeness: add the VAT over the commission and your invoice reads over 16 euros instead of over 13. That is almost a tenth of your revenue excluding VAT. As a VAT registered business you get that amount back, but you do finance it first. For a brand selling thousands of items a month that is a cash flow item, not a footnote. How to set up the fields on your product page so you can actually justify that price is covered in optimising your bol.com listing.

The price thresholds in Amazon's 2026 reductions cost money just above the ceiling

Amazon is lowering rates in the EU stores in 2026 and says sellers pay an average of € 0.17 less per product sold. Those reductions are real, and they are tied to a price ceiling. That ceiling is the interesting part, because it creates a dead zone in your price list.

As of 5 January 2026 these changes apply: Home Products as a new category from 15% to 8% for items up to and including € 20, Pet Clothing and Food from 15% to 5% up to and including € 10, and Grocery and Gourmet plus vitamins, minerals and supplements from 8% to 5% up to and including € 10. Clothing and Accessories sits on an earlier date: that reduction applies from 15 December 2025, from 8% to 5% up to and including € 15 and from 15% to 10% between € 15 and € 20.

Source: Amazon's pricing page for sellers.

Now our own calculation, with an item in Home Products priced exactly on the ceiling and the same item fifty cents dearer.

Own calculation based on the rates and ceilings on Amazon's pricing page.

You raise your price by fifty cents and keep 98 cents less. That is not rounding. That is a dead zone in your price list, and it sits exactly on the price point where most household goods live.

In fairness: the exact band rate above the ceiling has to be confirmed per category in Amazon's fee schedule. We calculate here with the rate that applied before the reduction, because the announcement ties the reduction explicitly to a ceiling. Check it for your own category before you adjust your prices.

How wide is the dead zone above a price ceiling?

Wider than the fifty cents in the example, and the width depends on how big the jump in the rate is. The table below is entirely our own calculation based on the percentages and ceilings Amazon publishes. The last column shows the price you need to keep the same net amount as on the ceiling.

Own calculation based on the rates and ceilings on Amazon's pricing page.

Read that last column as a no go area. At Home Products the dead zone runs from just above the ceiling to over 21 euros: every price in that range earns you less than the price on the ceiling itself. That is a strip of more than one and a half euros in which you hurt yourself by getting more expensive. At Grocery that same strip is only 33 cents wide, because the jump there is three percentage points instead of seven.

The practical lesson is not that you should push everything under a ceiling. Some products belong above the ceiling and then that is simply where they belong. The lesson is that you need to know where your ceiling sits before you pick a price. The most common pricing decision in e-commerce is a few euros on top because purchasing costs went up. That is precisely the decision that pushes you through a ceiling like this.

Anyone who lays their price list against these ceilings once a year almost always finds two or three items sitting just on the wrong side. Often those are items with a price that was rounded up at some point, or variants that inherited the price of the main variant plus a markup. Nobody did anything wrong there. The ceilings simply did not exist yet when those prices were set.

Where does that 19.7% come from?

That cannot be recalculated, and that is the core of the problem. The underlying report is not public. The research page of the agency that produced the survey publishes figures only after internal review is complete and contains no numbers itself. There is a methodology, not a dataset.

This is an observation, not an accusation. Such a working method is defensible. It just means a seller who wants to base a channel choice on that percentage cannot check whether it applies to their own category and price point.

What you can establish: that average of 19.7% sits above the band of 8% to 15% Amazon itself publishes for referral fees. So it cannot be a bare referral fee. There is more inside that number, and what exactly that more is appears nowhere. Fulfilment? Selling plan fees? Advertising costs? Each of those three is a substantial item for an average seller, and each of those three is also an item you influence yourself.

That is what makes the number collapse. A percentage with fulfilment inside it does not measure how expensive the platform is but how thick your box is. A percentage with advertising costs inside it does not measure the platform but the quality of your listing and your bid. Both of those are items you can steer. Hiding them inside a single average turns a controllable cost into a force of nature.

So this is how you read reports like this: as a signal that you need to check your own figures, not as a conclusion you can adopt. We do that for every brand that comes to us running both channels, and the outcome almost always deviates from the market average. Usually because the brand sits in one category and not in ten.

There is another catch with comparisons like these. A marketplace with a low commission percentage can still be the most expensive channel, because you have to advertise more there to be seen or because the shipping model works out more expensively for your box size. A percentage measures one line item. Your margin is the sum of four. Steer on the first and ignore the other three and you optimise the wrong number with a great deal of conviction.

How to recalculate your margin per marketplace

In five steps, with a spreadsheet that fits on one A4. The goal is not a perfect cost price model. The goal is one number per item per channel that you dare to base a decision on.

One: convert everything to excluding VAT. Take your selling price including VAT, strip out the VAT component that applies to your product, and use that amount as the denominator for everything that follows. This is the step most comparisons skip and the one that shifts the outcome most.

Two: take the real category rate, plus the fixed amount. Not the mid point of the band and not a market average. The percentage that belongs to your category, and the fixed amount per item if the platform charges one.

Three: add your fulfilment and shipping costs. For physical products this item is often bigger than the commission itself, and it hangs on your packaging size. How that size determines your rate is covered in the fee ladder for packaging dimensions on Amazon and for the other side in bol shipping costs and packaging size.

Four: spread your fixed platform costs. A monthly selling plan is tens of cents per item at a hundred sales and almost nothing at ten thousand. Without that division you compare apples with pears between channels with different volumes.

Five: calculate per item, not per catalogue. An average across your whole assortment hides exactly the items that sit just above a ceiling.

This costs you an afternoon for your twenty most important items. After that you know per channel which item earns money and which item rides along on the rest. That is a different conversation from the question of which marketplace is most expensive on average.

Two things you had better not forget in that sheet. Returns belong in it, because you do not always get the commission on a returned item back in full and the outbound trip has already cost money. And your advertising costs belong in it as a separate line, not averaged away across your whole account. An item that sells without advertising and an item that runs entirely on paid traffic have the same commission and a completely different margin. Put those two into one average and the very difference you wanted to steer on disappears.

What your price, your listing and your packaging do to your margin together

The commission percentage is the only one of the four items you cannot change. Your price, your presentation and your packaging size are all three yours to set, and they work on each other. That is where the gain sits, and that is also where the real design work begins.

Take the price ceiling from the previous sections. Getting under a ceiling means a lower price, and a lower price means you need the volume to earn the difference back. That volume comes from your conversion, and your conversion comes from your listing. An item that sits just under a ceiling and does not sell is more expensive than the same item two euros higher that does sell. The pricing decision and the content decision are therefore one decision, not two.

On bol that means working within a tight set of fields, because there is no module system there to put your story into. What is and is not possible we have written up in A+ Content on bol.com does not exist. On Amazon you have more room, and now that buyers increasingly arrive through AI assistants, a different reading direction as well: see optimising your Amazon listing for AI.

There is another reason to take those two together. Setting a price under a ceiling often means you have to take something out of your proposition, or precisely that you have to add something to justify the higher price. That is not a pricing question but a brand question, and you answer it on the page. A bundle that lifts you from eighteen to twenty four euros only makes sense if the page explains why that bundle is not two separate products in one bag.

And then packaging. It is not in this story for decoration. On an item of 20 euros in the lowest fee band, more than one and a half euros goes to the platform. Packaging that is one tier too thick costs a comparable amount per order on Amazon in the Dutch store. That amount appears nowhere as a problem in your dashboard. We therefore always pull those two items into the same table, because they compete for the same euro. That is why packaging design starts with a dimensions sheet for us and not with a moodboard.

How we treat a marketplace commission in a brand project

As one cost item next to two others, not as a channel choice. In six years of Oase Creative we have guided more than 200 brands on bol, Amazon and Shopify, and the question "which platform is cheapest" comes up in almost every intake. The answer is almost never a platform. The answer is an item, a price and a box.

What we do in practice: lay each channel's fee page next to the brand's price list, work it through per item to net excluding VAT, and then look at which items sit just on the wrong side. That usually produces three kinds of outcome. Items hanging just above a ceiling that fit underneath it with a few cents off. Items where the fixed amount per item weighs more heavily than the percentage, and which therefore benefit from bundling. And items where it is not the commission but the packaging tier that makes the difference.

Only after that does it become a design conversation. A product listing built on a price that is wrong is expensive work on the wrong side of the calculation. The other way round, a price that is right but is not justified by the page is a price that never gets tested.

Oase grew out of an e-commerce brand of our own, not out of a design agency that added e-commerce later. That is exactly the gap we had ourselves back then. We knew the rates by heart, the listing looked good, and nobody had ever put those two on one sheet of paper. It took years before we realised that was one decision.

What makes this work so rewarding is that the outcome can be calculated in advance. With most design decisions you estimate the effect afterwards. Not here. An item that drops a ceiling, or a box that drops a tier, produces an amount you can point to on the fee page. That also makes the conversation with a brand more honest. We do not have to promise a conversion lift to show that an intervention pays for itself.

If you want to know where this goes wrong in your assortment, start with your twenty best selling items and the spreadsheet from the previous section. If you find out it is not your price but what the page makes of your price, then how to grow your webshop in 2026 is the next step. And if you get stuck on which of the three items to tackle first, book a conversation. We start at the spreadsheet, not at the moodboard.