The Same $40 Product Pays Three Different Bills

Every marketplace comparison on the internet argues about referral percentages. Sellers do not pay percentages — they pay bills, and the bill is a stack: a plan fee here, a fulfillment fee there, a storage line that only shows up in October. This page puts the three stacks side by side, using only the rates documented on this site at the time of writing, then runs the same $40 product through all three so you can see where the money actually goes.

The three stacks at a glance

Every figure in that table comes from our own Amazon FBA fees guide, our Walmart referral & WFS fees guide, our TikTok Shop fees guide and the calculators linked under each section below. Marketplace schedules change; treat this as the stack as documented here at the time of writing, and re-run your own product before you price anything.

Amazon: the deepest stack, because it sells the most

Amazon charges before you sell anything: $39.99 a month for the Professional plan, or $0.99 per item on the Individual plan. The referral fee is a percentage of the total sale amount — item price plus any shipping the customer pays — commonly around 15% in many categories, around 8% for electronics, with a per-item minimum of roughly $0.30. Fulfillment is where the stack deepens: FBA runs roughly $3 to $7 per small standard unit, storage sits at roughly $0.87 to $1.10 per cubic foot per month for most of the year and jumps to around $2.40 from October to December, and units that sit past a year attract an aged-inventory surcharge on top.

None of that makes Amazon bad value — it makes Amazon a stack you price deliberately or not at all. The full breakdown, including a worked $29.99 product, is in our Amazon FBA fees explained guide, and you can run your own numbers in the free Amazon FBA profit calculator.

Walmart: one referral fee, honestly labelled — then WFS

Walmart’s headline is the cleanest of the three: as our Walmart fee calculator puts it, Walmart charges a single referral fee per sale — no monthly fee, no listing fees. The catch is in the category table: 15% in most categories, but 8% for consumer electronics, 6% for personal computers, 12% for automotive & industrial and 20% for jewelry, with a $1.80 minimum fee per item that catches low-priced listings out.

Fulfill through WFS and the stack grows the way Amazon’s does — a per-unit fulfillment fee by size and weight, storage per cubic foot, and your inbound shipping to get stock into Walmart’s network. Our Walmart referral & WFS fees guide works a $40 blender through the whole stack; its numbers are the Walmart column in the comparison below.

TikTok Shop: the cheapest referral — and the wildcard

On referral alone, TikTok Shop wins easily: around 6% on most categories for US sellers, roughly 8% for fashion and about 5% for jewelry, calculated on what the customer pays. There is no platform fulfillment line in the documented stack — shipping your orders is your own cost, at your own rates.

The wildcard is the affiliate commission. When a creator’s video or livestream drives the sale, you pay the commission rate you set — anywhere from 1% to 80%. The US average sits near 13%, most sellers offer somewhere between 10% and 25%, and roughly 42% of US TikTok Shop GMV is creator-driven, which means the affiliate cut is frequently the largest fee on the order. A marketplace whose traffic is rented from creators prices differently from one whose traffic arrives through search. Our TikTok Shop fees explained guide works a $50 order both ways, and the free TikTok Shop fee calculator lets you set your own commission band.

The same $40 product, three bills

Here is the comparison that matters. Take a countertop blender listed at $40.00 with shipping built into the price. The Amazon and Walmart columns are the documented worked example from our Walmart fees guide, with example inputs of the same kind on both sides; the TikTok column is computed from the rates in our TikTok fees guide on the same $40 price, with the affiliate commission set at 15% — inside the documented typical band. Illustrative, but every input is traceable to a page on this site.

Read it twice, because it cuts both ways. With a creator driving the sale, TikTok Shop takes $8.40 of the $40 before your product cost and your shipping — the cheapest bill here. Sell the same unit through the shop tab with no affiliate attached and the platform take falls to $2.40, the lowest of the three by a distance. Now push the commission to 25% to win more creator volume and the TikTok total becomes $12.40 — inside a dollar of Walmart, before you have paid a cent of shipping. The referral rate was never the decision. The stack is.

What this comparison leaves out — on purpose

Three cost lines sit on top of every stack above, on all three marketplaces, and none of them appears in a fee schedule. Advertising is the largest: the referral fee buys you the listing, not the click, and on Amazon and Walmart the sponsored-placement bill is set by your category’s auction, not by a rate card. Returns handling is the second: a returned unit can carry processing, inspection and unsellable-stock costs that dwarf the original fulfillment fee, and return rates are a property of your product and your listing’s honesty, not of the platform. The third is your own operation — the hours spent feeding three different seller centres, three policy regimes and three payout calendars.

That is why the honest unit of comparison is never the fee table. It is the full stack, on your product, at your price, with your return rate and your ad spend — which is the entire reason the calculators exist. A seller who chooses a marketplace on referral percentage alone has priced the shop window and ignored the rent.

The shortlist, by seller

Testing a first product: Walmart’s lack of a monthly fee makes it the cheapest place to be wrong, and TikTok Shop the cheapest place to find out whether strangers want the thing on camera. Amazon’s $39.99 is the price of the deepest search traffic in the business — worth paying once the product has proven it can convert.

Established on Amazon, adding a channel: Walmart first, in most cases. The referral maths is near-identical to what you already model, the catalogue transfers, and the marginal cost is WFS inbound and your attention. TikTok Shop second — not because it is worse, but because it is a different discipline: the listing does not sell the product, the content does.

Video-first brand: TikTok Shop is the home channel and the others are distribution. Budget the affiliate commission the way Amazon sellers budget ACoS — as the cost of the sale, reviewed weekly, with a ceiling per product.

So which marketplace is cheapest for you?

It depends on what your product needs the platform to do. A considered purchase that buyers search for by name lives on Amazon’s traffic, and Amazon’s stack is the price of that traffic — manageable, but only if you model it before you ship inventory in. A product already priced for Amazon usually tests cheaply on Walmart: a near-identical referral rate, no monthly fee, and a second channel for the same stock. A product that demonstrates well on video belongs on TikTok Shop, where the referral is lowest — as long as you budget the affiliate commission as a cost of sale from day one, not as an optional bonus you discover on the payout report.

Run the same product through all three calculators before you commit to any of them: the Amazon FBA profit calculator, the Walmart fee calculator and the TikTok Shop fee calculator are all free, and the differences between their outputs are the real answer to the question this article’s title asks.