Should I sell on OTTO or Amazon?

What OTTO and Amazon charge you

Both marketplaces charge a monthly fee and a fee per sale. The numbers are as OTTO and Amazon stated them in October 2026.

You pay the OTTO base fee from the month after the one in which your account is ready to sell. That applies even if you haven't listed an item yet. Until July 2024 it was 39.90 €. OTTO has no plan without a monthly fee like Amazon's Individual plan.

The OTTO commission depends on your item's commission group, meaning the group of items OTTO charges the same rate for, such as furniture, garden or jewellery. In the partner portal it isn't shown next to your item. Where to find it and all of OTTO's rates are in How high is the OTTO commission in 2026? Some groups are tiered, per price band, so each part of the price has its own rate. Furniture on OTTO, for example, costs 19% up to 150 € and 18% from 150 to 500 €, on Amazon 15% up to 200 € and 10% above.

The OTTO commission already contains the payment fee of 2.7%, OTTO's fee for processing the payment. It comes on a separate invoice from OTTO Payments but costs you nothing extra. OTTO doesn't state a fee for listing items.

If you only give a customer on OTTO a price reduction and they keep the goods, OTTO keeps the OTTO commission and payment fee in full. What a month on OTTO costs with all items is covered in OTTO fees: what does selling on OTTO cost?

When OTTO and Amazon pay you out

OTTO pays out every Thursday. A sale falls due 14 days after shipping, and on Thursday you get everything that fell due in the 7 days before. If the due date itself lands on a Thursday, the money only arrives a week later. OTTO deducts its fees and your returns directly from the payout.

Since June 2026 OTTO has been testing Early Payouts in a pilot. If you take part, your money arrives 7 days earlier, and OTTO charges 0.4% of the amount plus VAT for it. On OTTO, the risk of a customer not paying is carried by the payment service OTTO Payments, not by you.

Since 2026, Amazon in Germany only pays out 7 days after confirmed delivery. You can request a payout there yourself every 24 hours.

Who can sell on OTTO

On Amazon you register yourself, even as a sole proprietor. Amazon checks your ID, a proof of address no more than 180 days old, and your bank account.

OTTO reviews each application individually. In 2026, a company based in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Austria or France can sell, and Denmark is being added in a pilot. OTTO doesn't accept Kleinunternehmer (small businesses under § 19 UStG, the German VAT exemption). Your items need an EAN and must be new, you ship from a warehouse in Germany or the EU, and your customer service speaks German. OTTO has no counterpart to FBA, so you handle shipping yourself. According to OTTO, the review of your documents alone can take up to 15 working days. How registration works is covered in How do I become a seller on OTTO?

How big OTTO is next to Amazon

In the 2025/26 financial year OTTO sold goods worth 7.5 billion €, marketplace included. According to OTTO, more than 13 million active customers buy on otto.de. According to an analytics service, amazon.de had around 318 million visits in September 2026 and otto.de around 51 million. Around 6,100 sellers sell on OTTO, and on Amazon more than 40,000 small and medium-sized companies from Germany alone.

So OTTO is much smaller. If you sell there, you're adding a second marketplace, not replacing Amazon.

Advertising on OTTO and on Amazon

Amazon's paid ads for individual items are called Sponsored Products, and OTTO's are called Sponsored Product Ads. You pay per click, at least 0.20 €. Only an item where you hold the BuyBox can bid, meaning OTTO offers your listing for purchase on the product page. As on Amazon, OTTO chooses the searches itself in an automatic campaign, and in a manual campaign you book keywords, the words your item should appear for when someone searches them.

You'll notice three differences right away.

• You can't bid on other sellers' brands. Your ad doesn't appear in their search results and product lists, only on their product detail pages.
• OTTO credits a click with the purchases of the next 14 days, by default all purchases of your brand. The ad revenue of the last 14 days can therefore still grow, so only judge a period once it's that far back. ACoS, ad spend as a share of ad revenue, is called „KUR (ACoS)“ at OTTO.
• OTTO has no brand ads with a logo and own store, like Sponsored Brands on Amazon.

In practice, sellers coming from Amazon notice the structure first. On Amazon there's an ad group under the campaign that bundles items and keywords, and you combine several campaigns in a portfolio. OTTO has neither. Directly under the campaign sit the targetings. A targeting is what you put a bid on, and on OTTO it always applies to one item. If you book a keyword for 3 items, that's 3 targetings with their own numbers on OTTO and 1 targeting on Amazon, with numbers that mix all 3 items. On OTTO you can therefore see which item sells with which keyword, but setting it up is more work. How advertising on OTTO works overall is covered in How do Sponsored Product Ads work on OTTO?

What things are called on OTTO compared with Amazon

How to gather your OTTO costs for the comparison

The partner portal has no page showing all your costs on OTTO together. For a given period, here's how to get them.

1. Open „Finanzen“ (Finance) → „Marktplatzgebühren“ (Marketplace fees). Every Wednesday you'll find an invoice for the OTTO commission and a „Rechnungskorrektur“ (invoice correction) for returns, as PDF and CSV. According to the Helpdesk, the CSV lists SKU, commission group and the OTTO commission in euros per sale.
2. Open „Finanzen“ → „Paymentgebühren“ (Payment fees). Every week you'll find the payment fee invoice and its refund for returns. Only the commission invoice and the payment fee together make up the rate in OTTO's table.
3. Open „Finanzen“ → „Zahlungsbelege“ (Payment statements). Each week there's a statement with the amount OTTO pays you or debits on Thursday.
4. Under „Finanzen“ → „Kontoauszüge“ (Account statements), create a CSV with „Auszug erstellen“ (Create statement), according to the Helpdesk with all bookings of a period.
5. Under „Analysen“ → „Controlling“, OTTO shows marketplace fees as a share of revenue per commission area. According to OTTO's note, payment fee, OTTO base fee and shipping costs are missing from it. The share is therefore below the real rate.
6. Your ad spend is under „Marketing“ → „Marketing Dashboard“ as „Ausgaben“ (Spend).

Then you do the maths yourself. You add up OTTO commission, payment fee, the 16% on shipping costs, the OTTO base fee and ad spend, and subtract the refunds for returns. OTTO doesn't describe where the OTTO base fee appears in the portal. According to the Helpdesk, OTTO bills it on the first of the month for the previous month.

Then you bring both marketplaces onto the same revenue basis. OTTO calculates the OTTO commission on the item price with VAT and the shipping costs at their own rate, Amazon calculates on the total price including shipping. If you don't divide the fees by the same revenue, one of the two looks cheaper than it is. And all this still doesn't tell you what a single item earns. For that you need your purchase price, your shipping and its ad spend per item.

In the end you have two numbers you can put next to Amazon. One is all OTTO fees as a share of your revenue. The other is what's left per item before you pay for ads. The example for a table shows exactly this calculation.

A garden table on OTTO and on Amazon

Say you sell the oak table for 100 € on both marketplaces, and your customers don't pay for shipping. A garden table on OTTO is in the furniture commission group, so OTTO keeps 19% OTTO commission, 19 € per table. Amazon takes a 15% referral fee on furniture up to 200 €, so 15 €. Price, purchase price and shipping are an example, and the rates apply as stated by OTTO and Amazon. The fees are shown without the VAT on them.

Here's what's left per table before you pay for ads.

In this example the table brings you 4 € more on Amazon. The difference comes purely from the rate, 19% on OTTO against 15% on Amazon.

On top comes the monthly fee, which is spread across your whole account. Say your account makes 25,000 € of revenue in 30 days with all items. Then the 99.90 € OTTO base fee is 0.4% of that, and 39 € on Amazon is 0.16%.

The money also arrives at different speeds. If you ship the table on Monday, 5 October 2026, it falls due on OTTO on 19 October 2026, and OTTO pays out on Thursday, 22 October 2026. With Early Payouts the money arrives on 15 October 2026, and OTTO charges you 0.40 € plus VAT. If your parcel carrier delivers on Amazon on Wednesday, 7 October 2026, Amazon releases the money on 14 October 2026.