eBay Promoted Listings ROI Calculator

This eBay Promoted Listings ROI calculator helps you see how much profit is left after ad fees so you can tell when campaigns add profit and when they quietly erase margin. It’s built for eBay sellers who use Promoted Listings Standard or similar percentage-of-sale ad formats and want a fast way to sanity-check ad rates against their real unit economics.

1. Start with a realistic selling price / average order value

In the first box, enter your selling price or average order value (AOV) in USD for items that get promoted. Include shipping paid by the buyer if you usually charge for delivery. Using AOV makes the calculator reflect what actually happens across your orders, not just a single listing that sells occasionally.

2. Add your full product and fulfillment cost

The second box is your product + shipping cost: what it really costs you to get an order out the door. That should cover product cost, packaging, labels and an average shipping cost. If some orders are cheaper and others more expensive, use a conservative average so you don’t over-estimate profit.

3. Use an effective eBay + payment fee rate

eBay selling fees are mostly final value fees plus a small per-order charge and payment processing, which together tend to land in the low-to-mid teens as a percentage of the total sale. If you’re not sure, divide the total eBay + payment fees from a recent payout report by the total sales amount to get an effective rate for your niche, then plug that % into the calculator.

4. Enter your Promoted Listings ad rate

The ad rate is the percentage of the total sale amount that eBay charges when a buyer clicks a promoted listing and buys within the attribution window. If your campaign uses a range of ad rates across listings, start with the recommended or average rate. You can re-run the calculation with higher or lower ad rates to see how aggressive you can be before profit disappears.

5. Read the breakdown: profit, margin and break-even ad rate

After you click Calculate, the results box shows:

• Net profit per promoted order after product cost, eBay fees and ad fee,
• your profit margin after ads as a percentage of the sale price,
• the Promoted Listings fee per order in USD,
• the maximum ad rate you can pay before profit hits zero, and
• an estimated ROI on ad spend assuming the sale wouldn’t exist without ads.

The Copy summary button gives you a neat text summary you can paste into spreadsheets, planning docs or Slack when you’re discussing campaign changes with partners or VA’s.

6. Use a margin buffer, not the exact break-even

Hitting break-even on a typical order means some orders will still lose money once you factor in returns, coupons, undercharged shipping and category quirks. Many experienced sellers aim to keep their live ad rates at 60–80% of the calculated break-even ad rate so they still make money when AOV dips or fees change. Use this tool to find the ceiling, then set your real caps and rules comfortably below that line.

Remember, this calculator works on a per-order basis and assumes a promoted sale wouldn’t have happened organically. In reality you’ll have a mix of organic, offsite and promoted sales. Always validate the math against your eBay Seller Hub reports and pivot campaigns or listings that aren’t pulling their weight.

Math explainer: profit, break-even ad rate and ROI

The calculator models a single promoted sale. Let S be your selling price/AOV in USD, C your product + shipping cost, f the effective eBay + payment fee rate as a decimal (for example 0.13 for 13%), and a your Promoted Listings ad rate as a decimal (for example 0.05 for 5%).

Platform fees excluding ads are:

Platform fees = S × f

The Promoted Listings fee on a sale is:

Ad fee = S × a

Profit on an equivalent organic sale with no ad fee is:

Profit without ads = S − C − (S × f)

Profit on a promoted sale at your current ad rate is:

Profit with ads = S − C − (S × f) − (S × a)

To find the break-even ad rate, we set profit with ads to zero and solve for a:

0 = S − C − S×f − S×a

Rearranging:

a = (S − C − S×f) ÷ S

which is simply your profit without ads as a percentage of the sale price. The calculator converts this into a percentage to show the maximum ad rate you can pay before margin hits zero on a typical promoted order.

For ROI on ad fees, the tool assumes the promoted sale wouldn’t have happened without advertising, so the entire profit on that order is “return” from your Promoted Listings spend:

Ad ROI multiple = profit with ads ÷ ad fee

and the percentage ROI is:

Ad ROI % = (profit with ads ÷ ad fee) × 100

If that ROI is comfortably positive and your real-world reports show incremental sales from Promoted Listings, your campaigns are likely adding profit. If ROI is negative or very low, it’s a strong signal to reduce ad rates, tighten targeting or switch budget to healthier listings.

References and further reading

• eBay Seller Center – Promoted Listings – Official overview of Promoted Listings strategies, controls and performance reporting.
• Promoted Listings overview (eBay Help) – How Promoted Listings work, where ads appear and how fees are charged.
• Promoted Listings Standard FAQs – Details on ad rates, attribution windows and how ad fees sit on top of normal selling fees.
• Promoted Listings – cost and ad rate details – Explanation of how ad rates are applied to the total sale amount for promoted items.
• What are eBay Promoted Listings? – Third-party breakdown of formats, ad rates and when Promoted Listings make financial sense.