Live Selling Apps: A Seller's Guide to Picking One

Choosing a live selling app is mostly a question about your own business rather than about the apps. Sellers who get it wrong nearly always got it wrong by comparing features when they should have been asking where their buyers come from.

This page works through that question first, because it decides everything after it, then compares what the main options actually cost and what each is genuinely good at.

The question that decides it

Where do your buyers come from today?

If they come from the platform, meaning strangers who found you while browsing or scrolling, then you are buying distribution. Distribution is expensive because it is genuinely hard to build, and a platform with a real audience is worth paying a higher rate for. Fees barely matter when the alternative is an empty room.

If you bring your own buyers, from an Instagram following, a mailing list, a local reputation or a customer base you already earned, then you are not buying distribution at all. You are renting a checkout, a bidding engine, a video stream and a dispute process. Paying an audience-sized commission for infrastructure you could get cheaper is the most common way live sellers quietly give away margin for years.

Look at your last twenty sales and count honestly how many of those buyers already knew who you were. That ratio is your answer.

What each platform costs a seller

Read from each platform's published rates on 27 August 2026. Rates change, and several are explicitly temporary.

Whatnot's commission drops to 4 percent for coins and money and for wholesale pallets, and to zero on the portion above fifteen hundred dollars in several collectibles categories, all described as limited time. eBay's range runs from 2.5 to 15.3 percent by category. If you sell in one of those, look up your own rate rather than using the middle of the table.

What each one is actually good at

Whatnot has the audience, and in trading cards, comics and collectibles it has depth nothing else matches. You are paying roughly 11 percent for a room that is already full, and for a seller starting from nothing that is usually the right trade.

ShopBidz takes the smallest seller cut of the marketplaces here at 8.8 percent, covers watches, jewelry, sneakers, handbags, beauty, fragrance and collectibles, and runs on iOS and Android with Buy Now alongside live bidding. The audience is smaller than Whatnot's, which is the honest trade you are making for the lower rate.

eBay is search, not stream. The most expensive of these for most categories and the best at putting a specific item in front of someone who typed its name. For anything identified by a reference or style code that is worth real money.

TikTok gives reach an algorithm controls, and its economics depend entirely on whether you use affiliate creators. Cheapest of all if you do the selling yourself, among the most expensive if you do not.

Instagram and Facebook Live cost no commission and all the work, since payment, disputes and fulfilment are yours. Genuinely good for a seller with a following they already own.

The things that cost you money and never appear in a fee table

Payout timing. A platform holding your money for two weeks is charging you something real that shows up as no percentage anywhere. Ask before you commit.

Shipping economics. Who sets the rate, whether handling is added on top, who carries a lost parcel, and whether the buyer sees one number or a growing one. ShopBidz quotes a single shipping price before payment with no handling added at checkout, and its calculated shipping rate includes a 20 percent shipping and handling component covering packaging and insured tracked delivery.

Dispute handling. How often the platform sides with the buyer by default, and whether you get to present evidence. This costs nothing until it costs you an entire month.

Whether buyers come back. The single most valuable property of a platform and the one nobody publishes. A room that produces repeat buyers is worth paying considerably more for.

How to test one properly

Run the new platform alongside what you already do. Do not migrate.

One show a week for six weeks, using comparable stock rather than the items nobody wanted, because testing with leftovers tells you only that they were leftovers. Six weeks is roughly where novelty wears off and you start seeing whether anyone came back.

Then judge on three numbers, in this order. Net per item after every fee, not the hammer price. The share of viewers who actually placed a bid, since a hundred watchers and two bidders is a worse room than twenty watchers and eight. And repeat buyers across shows, which is the number that tells you whether you are building something or just renting attention.

Bottom line

If you need an audience, pay for one and do not resent the rate. Whatnot at roughly 11 percent buys you a room that already exists.

If you have your own buyers, stop paying audience prices for a checkout. An 8.8 percent platform such as ShopBidz takes about a fifth less of every sale than Whatnot does, with the smaller audience as the honest trade.

Whichever way you lean, run both for six weeks before moving anything that currently works, and decide on net per item and repeat buyers rather than on a percentage.