Two different machines
Both routes end with a stranger owning the object and money arriving in the seller's account. Almost everything between those two points is different, and the differences are not cosmetic. They change what the object is worth.
Who the object is shown to
A marketplace shows an item to whoever searches for it. That audience is enormous and almost entirely non-specialist, which is a strength for anything a general buyer can recognise and value on sight. A camera, a power tool, a recent edition of a common book: these do well in front of a large crowd of people who already know roughly what they are worth.
A saleroom shows an item to a much smaller audience that has been assembled on purpose. A specialist sale gathers people who follow that field, and the catalogue is written for them. For an object whose value depends on knowing what it is, twenty informed bidders beat twenty thousand uninformed browsers.
The practical test is whether the object's worth is visible in a photograph. If it is, reach matters more. If it needs someone to explain a maker's mark or a period, expertise matters more.
Who does the work
On a marketplace the seller does all of it. Photography, description, category selection, answering questions, packing, dispatch, and dealing with whatever goes wrong afterwards. That labour is unpaid and it is the reason the percentage is lower.
A saleroom absorbs most of it. Staff catalogue the item, photograph it, describe its condition, hold it securely, run the sale, take the buyer's money and chase them if it does not arrive. The commission and the itemised charges pay for that.
Neither is better in the abstract. A seller with time and one object is buying convenience expensively if they consign it. A seller clearing a large house who values their weekends is buying it cheaply.
What each one charges
eBay's published schedule sets out two main seller charges: an insertion fee when a listing is created and a final value fee when the item sells. The company states that sellers get up to 250 zero insertion fee listings each month, or more with a store subscription. The final value percentage varies by category, and the schedule as retrieved on 29 August 2026 carries a range of different rates rather than a single number. Anyone budgeting a sale should read the rate for their own category rather than working from a figure quoted second-hand.
Saleroom charges are not published in one place because they differ by house and often by sale. The structure is consistent even where the numbers are not: a commission taken as a percentage of the hammer price, plus itemised charges for lotting, photography, insurance while in storage, and sometimes an unsold fee. Ask for the schedule in writing before agreeing to anything, and read choosing where to sell alongside it.
Control, and what happens when it goes wrong
A marketplace seller can edit, relist, cut the price, or withdraw. A consigned lot is committed once the catalogue is printed, and the reserve is the only price control the seller retains.
Failure looks different too. A marketplace listing that nobody buys costs the seller time and possibly an insertion fee, and can be tried again next week at a lower price with no record of the first attempt. An unsold auction lot is a matter of public record: the catalogue entry persists, and an item that has visibly failed to sell is harder to place afterwards. That asymmetry is a real argument for testing an uncertain object on a marketplace first.
| Marketplace listing | Catalogued lot | |
|---|---|---|
| Who sets the price | The seller proposes, the market accepts or ignores | Bidders decide, above a floor the seller set |
| Audience | Very large, almost entirely non-specialist | Small, assembled deliberately, often expert |
| Who writes the description | The seller, read with some suspicion | The house, which has a reputation across every lot |
| Who does the work | The seller does all of it | The house does most of it, and charges for it |
| If it does not sell | Relist next week, no public record | Bought in, and the catalogue entry persists |
| Control after committing | Edit, cut the price, or withdraw at will | The reserve, and nothing else |
The description does different work in each place
On a marketplace the description is written by the seller and read with suspicion, because the buyer knows the person writing it wants the sale. Buyers compensate by discounting adjectives and looking hard at photographs, which is why a plain factual listing generally outperforms an enthusiastic one.
A catalogue entry is written by somebody with a reputation to protect across hundreds of lots and many years. That is why its language is so careful. Terms of art carry defined meanings about how confident the house is in an attribution, and a bidder who reads them properly can tell the difference between a firm claim and a hedge.
The consequence for a seller is that a saleroom will not repeat a claim it cannot stand behind, however certain the seller is. Anyone with documentation should produce it at intake rather than after the catalogue is written, because it is the evidence, not the insistence, that changes what the entry says.
Common questions
Is a saleroom always better for something old?
Age alone does not decide it. Plenty of genuinely old objects are common, easily recognised and worth modest sums, and those sell perfectly well on a marketplace without paying for expertise nobody needs. What pushes an item toward a saleroom is that its value depends on something a general buyer would not spot: an attribution, a period, a maker, a provenance.
Does a poor photograph hurt more in one place than the other?
It hurts everywhere, but it is recoverable in only one of them. A marketplace listing can be re-photographed and relisted at no great cost. A catalogue image is fixed once the catalogue is published, and it is doing its work in front of the entire audience for that sale on a single day. Where a saleroom photographs the lot itself, that risk moves to them, which is part of what the charge covers.