How to calculate your real profit selling Magic cards on Cardmarket
Your real profit on a Cardmarket sale is the sale price, minus Cardmarket's commission, minus any refund, minus what that exact copy cost you — and that cost includes its share of the shipping and fees you paid when you bought it. Looking only at "sold for" against "bought for" hides most of the cost and can turn a loss into an apparent profit.
Why "sold minus bought" is not your profit
Say you bought a card for 5.99 € and sold it for 6.42 €. That looks like 0.43 € profit. Three things are missing from that calculation:
- Your purchase shipping. The card came in an order with other cards, and you paid shipping for that order.
- Fees on the purchase, for example the trustee service fee if the order used it.
- Cardmarket's commission on the sale. Cardmarket charges sellers a commission on the article value of each sale — at the time of writing 5% for most sellers. Check the current fee table, because rates depend on your seller status and can change.
A worked example
You buy four cards in one order: 20.00 € worth of cards plus 1.25 € shipping. One of them is the 5.99 € card.
Step 1 – the cost of this copy. The shipping is spread over the cards of the order. Proportionally to price, this card carries 5.99 / 20.00 of the shipping:
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| Card price | 5.99 € |
| Share of shipping (1.25 € × 5.99 / 20.00) | 0.37 € |
| Cost of this copy | 6.36 € |
Step 2 – what the sale brings in. You sell it for 6.42 €. Cardmarket keeps 5% commission:
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| Sale price | 6.42 € |
| Commission (5%) | −0.32 € |
| Net from the sale | 6.10 € |
Step 3 – profit. 6.10 € − 6.36 € = −0.26 €. The "0.43 € profit" was a small loss.
With cheap cards this effect is bigger, not smaller: a share of the shipping weighs far more on a 0.50 € card than on a 50 € card.
Shipping and fees: spread over the order
Shipping is paid once per order, but you sell cards one by one. To know what a single copy cost, the order's shipping and fees have to be split across its cards. Two common ways:
- By price (proportional). Expensive cards carry more of the shipping. This is usually the fairest split, because the expensive cards are why you placed the order.
- Evenly per card. Every card carries the same amount. Simpler, but bulk cards end up looking more expensive than they were.
Pick one and stay with it — consistency matters more than the method.
Which copy did you sell? First in, first out
If you bought the same card twice at different prices, which purchase price belongs to the sale? The usual answer is first in, first out (FIFO): the copy you bought first is the one that leaves first.
Example: you bought one copy for 3.00 € in March and another for 5.00 € in June. In July you sell one for 6.00 €.
- With FIFO, the sale uses the March copy: profit before fees is 3.00 €, and the copy still in stock cost 5.00 €.
- With an average cost you would say 4.00 € for both — which is fine for a rough idea, but your stock value and your profit per sale no longer match any real purchase.
FIFO keeps every number traceable to an actual order, which is what you want if you ever need to explain a figure.
Refunds
If a buyer receives a card in a worse condition than listed and you refund part of the price, that refund belongs to the sale of that card. A 6.42 € sale with a 1.42 € refund is a 5.00 € sale. If you track refunds only as a lump sum in your bank account, your profit per card — and your idea of which cards sell well — will be wrong.
Cards from boosters and openings
When you open a booster, the cards inside have no purchase price of their own. A sensible approach is to spread what you paid for the booster over the cards you pulled. Then every single you sell from it has a cost, and you can see whether opening the box was worth it.
Doing it without a spreadsheet
You can do all of this in a spreadsheet, but it gets tedious fast: every purchase order needs its shipping split, every sale needs to find the right purchase, and refunds have to be matched to cards.
CardTradeMate does it from the Cardmarket orders themselves. The browser add-on imports purchases and sales with shipping, commission, trustee fee and refunds; each sale is matched to the copy you bought first; and the profit of every sale, every card and every month is calculated from that. Whether the shipping you charge buyers counts towards profit is a setting.
CardTradeMate gives you profit figures and monthly reports. It is not accounting or tax software — for tax questions, ask a tax advisor.