Reverb Fee Calculator

The maths behind it

Reverb charges a selling fee as a percentage of the sale price including shipping, plus a payment processing fee on the total.

Net = (price + shipping) − (price + shipping) × selling fee − payment processing − actual shipping cost.

The category is musical instruments and audio equipment, where items are high-value, heavy and fragile, which makes shipping the dominant operational question.

Putting numbers to it

A guitar listed at $850 with $65 of shipping charged. A 5% selling fee on $915 is $45.75; payment processing at 2.7% + $0.25 is $24.96.

Actual shipping in a proper case with insurance: $78. Packaging and materials: $22.

Net is $915 − $45.75 − $24.96 − $78 − $22 = $744.29. Against a $520 acquisition cost that is $224.29, a 30% margin.

The fees total $70.71, or 7.7% of the transaction, modest for a marketplace, which reflects a category where the platform's value is a specialist audience rather than general traffic.

Where it is unreliable

Shipping cost on this category is genuinely difficult to estimate. Instruments are oversize, fragile and frequently attract additional handling charges, and undercharging on shipping is the most common way a profitable sale becomes a loss.

Damage in transit is also a real and expensive risk. Insurance and proper packing are not optional, and their cost belongs in the model rather than being treated as a contingency.

How to act on this

Quote shipping from a real rate for a real packed weight and dimension, including the case, before listing. The oversize thresholds from the shipping cluster apply directly and they bite hard on instruments.

Then insure at replacement value rather than at cost. On a $850 item the premium is small against the exposure, and this is one of the categories where the claim rate justifies it.

Why specialist marketplaces command their fees

A 5% fee is well below the general marketplace range, and the reason is that specialist platforms do less work. They bring an audience that already knows the category and needs no education.

For the seller, the value is buyers who understand condition grading, model variants and fair pricing, which reduces disputes and negotiation dramatically compared with a general marketplace.

That is the pattern across specialist platforms generally: lower fees, smaller audience, higher intent, and far less friction per transaction. For anyone selling into a defined enthusiast category, the specialist channel usually outperforms the general one even at lower traffic, because conversion and average value are both substantially higher.

On top of that, condition descriptions carry real weight with informed buyers, and understating a flaw generates a dispute that costs the return shipping on an oversize item.

Photographing every flaw explicitly is the cheapest form of dispute prevention available, and on high-value instruments a single avoided return covers the effort many times over.

Seasonality is pronounced in the category, with demand concentrated around the end of the year and again in the spring. Holding inventory to sell into a stronger window costs storage and frequently returns more than clearing it into a quiet month, which is unusual among resale categories.