"$2.95 flat under $15, 20% above it" reads like the flat fee is the bargain tier — a fixed small charge instead of a percentage cut. For most of that range, it's the opposite: the flat $2.95 fee costs a larger share of the sale than 20% would, all the way down to $14.75. Only in a narrow sliver just under $15 is the flat fee actually cheaper than the commission it's supposedly replacing.
Two tiers, one break-even point
Poshmark charges a flat $2.95 on any sale under $15, and a flat 20% commission on sales of $15 or more — no listing fee, no separate payment processing fee, nothing else stacked on top. The two formulas cross where $2.95 equals 20% of the price: $2.95 ÷ 0.20 = $14.75. That's the real break-even, not the $15 threshold where the formula switches.
What the flat fee actually costs, by price
| Sale price | Fee | Effective rate | You keep |
|---|---|---|---|
| $5.00 | $2.95 (flat) | 59.0% | $2.05 (41.0%) |
| $10.00 | $2.95 (flat) | 29.5% | $7.05 (70.5%) |
| $14.75 | $2.95 (flat) | 20.0% (break-even) | $11.80 (80.0%) |
| $14.99 | $2.95 (flat) | 19.7% | $12.04 (80.3%) |
| $15.00 | $3.00 (20%) | 20.0% | $12.00 (80.0%) |
| $20.00 | $4.00 (20%) | 20.0% | $16.00 (80.0%) |
Below $14.75, the flat fee is a worse deal than the commission it precedes — a $5 sale loses 59% of the price to the fee, nearly three times the 20% rate charged on anything priced at $15 or above. The fee only becomes a genuine discount in the $14.75–$14.99 sliver, where it's a few cents less than 20% would charge.
The transition at $15 is nearly seamless — the danger is well before it
Because $2.95 sits so close to 20% of $15 ($3.00), crossing the $15 threshold itself barely moves the fee — a nickel, in either direction. That's the opposite of eBay's per-order fee, which jumps $0.30 → $0.40 at its own $10 threshold. Poshmark's real hazard isn't a jump at the boundary; it's how steeply the effective rate climbs as price falls away from $15 toward $0, since the same flat $2.95 is being divided into a shrinking price.
The other thing that's different here: no shipping input
Every other seller-fee calculator on this site — Etsy, eBay, Walmart, Mercari — includes a shipping field, because those platforms fold buyer-paid shipping into the amount the fee is calculated on. Poshmark doesn't: it sets a flat rate for a prepaid USPS shipping label that the buyer pays directly, and for packages up to 5 lb, that charge never touches the seller's payout at all. So the Poshmark Fee Calculator takes a single input — sale price — because shipping genuinely isn't part of the fee base here, not because it was left out.
What this doesn't cover
Scoped to US sellers. Packages over 5 lb carry a shipping-cost overage that is a real cost to the seller, but isn't a single fixed, citable figure the way the $2.95/20% fee structure is, so it's stated as a limitation rather than approximated.