Methodology

People price real inventory against the numbers on this site. That obliges us to be explicit about where each number comes from, how confident we are in it, and what we do when we get one wrong. This page is that explanation, in full.

1. Where the rates come from

In order of preference, and we always take the highest one available:

1. The marketplace's own published fee page. Amazon India's fee schedule, Meesho's supplier pricing page. This is the only source we will label verified.
2. The marketplace's own announcements for changes not yet reflected in the rate card — for example Amazon's March 2026 zero-referral announcement.
3. A seller's own panel, where the rate is per-account and there is no public card. Used for Flipkart tier structures.
4. Reputable third-party reporting, for figures a marketplace does not publish anywhere. Always labelled estimate.

We do not source rates from other calculators, SEO blog posts, or aggregator sites. Those are where stale numbers replicate: one 2023 figure gets copied into a dozen articles, each citing the last, until "Amazon takes 15%" looks like consensus because it appears everywhere. Every rate we publish traces back to a primary source with a URL and a date.

2. Verified vs estimate — and why we admit the difference

Every fee group in this calculator carries one of two labels, and the label is shown to you in the interface rather than buried here:

This distinction is a rule we hold ourselves to, not a disclaimer. An estimate is never relabelled as verified without someone opening the official page and reading the number. A wrong rate that claims to be verified is worse than no calculator at all, because it converts a seller's healthy scepticism into misplaced confidence.

3. What is verified today, marketplace by marketplace

Roughly half of what this calculator uses is officially verified and roughly half is not. We think saying so plainly is more useful than the alternative.

4. How the profit calculation works

The core figure, per order:

effectivePrice is your selling price after any discount you apply. marketplaceFees is assembled per marketplace, because the three do not share a fee shape — they are genuinely different models, not one model with different constants:

Rounding happens only at display time. The underlying figures keep full precision, because multiplying a rounded per-order number by monthly volume amplifies the rounding error by exactly that volume — a ₹0.40 rounding becomes ₹200 a month at 500 orders.

5. GST and Input Tax Credit

This is where most calculators go wrong, and it is worth being precise about.

Your selling price includes GST that was never your money. You collect it from the customer and remit it. So the first thing to do is take it back out — that gives taxableValue, and that, not the sticker price, is your revenue.

Marketplaces also charge 18% GST on their own fees. If you are GST-registered, that is reclaimable as Input Tax Credit. You pay it and you get it back, so its net cost to your business is zero.

6. How we model returns

The common approach is profit × (1 − returnRate). That treats a return as a sale that never happened. It isn't — you have already paid to ship the item out, you pay again to ship it back, and the packaging is gone.

A return costs you real money rather than merely earning you none. On thin-margin products with a high return rate, the difference between these two formulas is the difference between a business that works and one that doesn't.

7. How the engine is tested

The calculation engine has 65 automated assertions that must pass before any change ships. They cover band resolution, each marketplace's fee shape, GST and ITC, returns, the monthly roll-up, ranking, and config integrity.

Two of them matter more than the rest:

• Conservation of money. Across 21 marketplace × price combinations, every rupee of the selling price must be accounted for as profit, cost, fee or tax. Nothing may vanish.
• GST neutrality. Profit must come out identical at 5%, 12%, 18% and 28% GST. If changing the tax rate moves the profit, GST is being treated as a cost somewhere.

Those two found the double-counting bug that fifty-nine arithmetic assertions had missed. Invariant tests beat example tests, because an invariant cannot share your misconception.

8. How often we re-check

Marketplace rates drift, sometimes without announcement. Two Amazon categories changed on 10 June 2026 — Tyres & Rims from 3% to 7%, and Fans & Robotic Vacuums in the ₹1,000–5,000 band from 4.5% to 7%.

• We re-check the published fee pages monthly, and immediately whenever a marketplace announces a change or a reader reports one.
• Each marketplace carries its own last-verified date, shown on the calculator card and cited in the guides. The guides read that same date from one source, so an article can't claim a freshness the data doesn't have.
• If a date looks old to you, trust the date over the number.

9. Correction policy

If a rate here is wrong, this is what we do about it:

1. You tell us — ideally with the marketplace, the category, the rate we show, the rate you see, and a screenshot.
2. We verify against the marketplace's own published source. We do not change a rate on a report alone, in either direction.
3. If confirmed, we correct the rate and update its verifiedOn date the same day.
4. If the error changed what the calculator recommended — a different marketplace winning, say — we note the correction in the affected guide rather than editing it silently.
5. If we cannot confirm it either way, we downgrade the rate to estimate rather than leaving a verified label we can no longer stand behind.

10. What we deliberately leave out

Myntra. Its commercials run through per-brand partner agreements with no public rate card, and third-party sources contradict each other by around 25 percentage points. There is no number we could publish and defend, so we publish none. Adding it would make the site look more complete and be less true.

"Sell on your own website" comparisons. A neutral tool that ends every comparison by recommending a website build is an advertisement. We don't sell websites and we don't want the incentive.

Both exclusions are recorded in the site's own configuration alongside the reasons, so a future maintainer can't quietly reverse them without reading why.

11. Independence and funding

This site is funded by advertising, and by nothing else. We take no affiliate commission from Amazon, Flipkart or Meesho, accept no paid placement, and sell no seller services. Nobody can pay to change a rate, a ranking, or a recommendation.

The reason is structural rather than moral: a calculator that earns more when it recommends a particular marketplace cannot be trusted to tell you when a different one wins, and being trusted about that is the only thing this tool has.

We are not affiliated with, endorsed by or partnered with any marketplace named on this site.

12. Limits — what this tool cannot tell you

Being clear about the edges is part of the method:

• It cannot know your negotiated terms. Established sellers get rates that differ from published ones. Where we know that happens — Flipkart tiers — we give you an override field.
• It cannot predict your return rate. Returns vary by category, price, size accuracy and photography. We model the cost of returns precisely; the rate you feed it is your estimate, and it is the input that moves the answer most.
• It cannot account for promotions and levies that marketplaces apply case by case — campaign fees, seasonal surcharges, penalty deductions.
• It is not tax or financial advice. GST treatment here reflects the standard registered-seller case. Composition scheme, exports and inter-state edge cases need your accountant.
• It will sometimes be out of date. Every page shows when its rates were checked so you can judge that for yourself.

Always confirm against your own seller panel before you commit to a price. We would rather be the tool that told you to check than the one you trusted too far.

Questions about any of this

Write to us — contact page. Challenges to the method are welcome; several of the explanations on this site exist because a reader pushed back on a number.