What does it cost to sell on OTTO?

The OTTO base fee

OTTO charges you 99.90 € a month plus VAT, however many items you offer. Since 1 July 2026 the invoice arrives on the first of the month for the previous month. It's settled through OTTO Payments, OTTO's payment service for sellers.

Until July 2024 it was 39.90 €, and some guides still quote this old number or no base fee at all.

If you come from Amazon, you know this as the monthly fee of the Professional plan. How OTTO and Amazon differ overall is covered in OTTO or Amazon, where is selling worth it?

The OTTO commission per sale

The OTTO commission is the share OTTO keeps from every sale. OTTO calculates it on the selling price including VAT. The rate depends on your item's commission group and lies between 7% and 22%. Some commission groups use a tiered commission, where each price band has its own rate. A garden table, for example, falls under Möbel (furniture), at 19% on the first 150 € and 18% on the part up to 500 €. All commission groups and rates are in What is the OTTO commission in 2026?

OTTO invoices the OTTO commission every Wednesday, with a closing invoice on the first of the month. OTTO adds VAT to the OTTO commission. If you can reclaim input VAT, this VAT costs you nothing.

On Amazon the counterpart is called the referral fee.

16% on shipping costs

If your customer pays shipping costs, OTTO takes its own OTTO commission of 16% on them. OTTO calculates it on the shipping costs including VAT and adds VAT here too. At 29.90 € for freight delivery that's 4.78 €.

The payment fee is already part of the OTTO commission

For payment processing OTTO takes a payment fee of 2.7%. It's already part of the OTTO commission rate and costs you nothing extra. Even so, it comes on its own invoice from OTTO Payments GmbH, every Wednesday. So don't deduct it a second time.

If OTTO offers your customer installments or a payment break, OTTO issues you financing fees for that. According to OTTO this causes you no additional costs.

Ads on OTTO only cost money if you book them

Advertising on OTTO is optional. The most important format is Sponsored Product Ads, which show your items in search results and on product pages. You pay per click, at least 0.20 €, and set your budget yourself. There are also Sponsored Display Ads, a second ad format that OTTO awards through an auction and that you know from Amazon as Sponsored Display. There too you choose budget and bid yourself. OTTO bills a month's ad spend on the 2nd of the following month on a separate invoice. How advertising on OTTO works is covered in How does advertising on OTTO work with Sponsored Product Ads?

OTTO can also charge for promotions. For a paid deal you pay a fixed amount that OTTO names per deal. It's only due once OTTO has shown the deal. There are also free deals, and a discount campaign on the marketplace costs nothing. „Flags mit Garantie“ (Flags with guarantee) was the name of a paid promotion for Black Friday 2025, for which your items needed a discount of at least 8% to 15%, depending on the area. OTTO charged 65 to 70 € per day and product for it.

What a return on OTTO costs you

Every return is free for your customer, who has a 30-day right of return. OTTO generates the return label with the details of your own contract with DHL, Hermes or GLS. So your parcel carrier bills the return shipping directly to you. According to OTTO, you have to pick up goods sent by freight from the customer free of charge and tell them the pickup date within 24 hours.

If you accept a return, OTTO refunds you the OTTO commission on the item with an invoice correction. OTTO doesn't say whether that includes the 16% on shipping costs. OTTO Payments also refunds the payment fee, according to OTTO in full or in part. OTTO doesn't say which case applies when. If you instead only give your customer a price reduction and they keep the goods, OTTO keeps the OTTO commission and payment fee in full. If your customer returns the whole order, they also get their shipping costs refunded. You don't get back your own shipping to the customer, the packaging or the ads.

In practice many sellers forget everything except the refund on a return. Return shipping and handling in the warehouse are then missing from the calculation. In practice, furniture that has been assembled and taken apart again usually goes as B-stock because it can't be sold as new. What a return costs exactly and how to lower your rate is covered in Lowering your OTTO return rate and what a return costs you

What each item costs you

On top of OTTO's fees come your own costs, meaning purchase price, shipping to the customer and packaging. Only when you deduct everything from a sale do you see what you keep. What's left after all costs per sale is called contribution margin, and margin is this amount as a percentage of revenue. How to calculate that for a single item is covered in How do I calculate my profit per item on OTTO?

Where to find your costs in OTTO's partner portal

There's no overview of all costs in the partner portal OTTO Partner Connect. Each fee sits in its own place, and OTTO writes in the Helpdesk that it can't provide any further reports.

1. In the left menu open „Finanzen“ (Finance) → „Marktplatzgebühren“ (Marketplace fees). Every Wednesday you'll find a „Rechnung“ (invoice) for the OTTO commission and a „Rechnungskorrektur“ (invoice correction) for the returns, plus the closing invoice. You download them as PDF or CSV and filter by period.
2. Open „Finanzen“ → „Paymentgebühren“ (Payment fees). The payment fee invoices for orders and for returns are here.
3. Open „Finanzen“ → „Servicegebühren“ (Service fees). The invoices for ads and deals are here as PDF, once a month.
4. For ad spend per item, open „Marketing“ → „Sponsored Product Ads“ and download the „Artikel-Report“ (Item report). Under „Finanzen“ you only find the total for the month.
5. Under „Finanzen“ → „Kontoauszüge“ (Account statements) you download all bookings for a period as CSV. „Zahlungsbelege“ (Payment documents) shows what OTTO pays you or debits every Thursday.
6. What return shipping cost you isn't in the partner portal. You'll find that on the invoices from your parcel carrier and your freight company.
7. Purchase price, shipping to the customer and packaging come from your own records.

Under „Analysen“ (Analytics) → „Controlling“ OTTO does show marketplace fees, but by shipping date and, according to the Helpdesk, without the OTTO base fee, without the fee on shipping costs and without the payment fee. According to OTTO, this report isn't meant for accounting.

You then bring everything together in one spreadsheet. The documents come weekly, on the first of the month, on the 2nd and from your parcel carrier. For one month that's quickly ten downloads or more, and you have to build a view of costs per item yourself.

One month of garden tables on OTTO

Say you sell 40 acacia garden tables in a month for 349 € each, and your customers each pay 29.90 € for freight delivery. 2 tables come back, and you accept the return. That leaves 38 tables sold. Purchase price, freight, packaging, pickup and ad spend are example values.

The 64.32 € of OTTO commission per table is 19% on the first 150 € and 18% on the remaining 199 €. Each table includes 9.42 € of payment fee. For the 2 tables that came back, OTTO refunds you the OTTO commission on the item, and the payment fee in it in full or in part. Whether OTTO also refunds the 16% on their shipping costs isn't stated in any OTTO document. So plan for it as not refunded, the way the example counts it for all 40 tables.

OTTO's fees without ads come to 2,735.26 €, which is 19.0% of your revenue including VAT. With ads it's 3,935.26 €. You keep 1,564.07 €, a margin of 10.9%. It's calculated on revenue including VAT, as in MargenOptimierer and in the guide on profit per item. The 2 returned tables aren't valued in this yet. If they go as B-stock, the amount falls further.

Work out what's left from a sale with your own numbers in the contribution margin and profit calculator.