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Glossary · Marketplaces

Take rate

The percentage a marketplace keeps from each transaction. A take rate set without passing landed cost through to pricing is a structural margin leak.

  • Reviewed
  • 3 min read
  • Part of the 14 term glossary
  • Median finding $58k a year across 74 audits
01

What Take rate means

A marketplace's take rate is the share of each transaction it keeps: its revenue from commissions and fees divided by the gross merchandise value, GMV, that passed through it. A platform that keeps $15 of every $100 booked has a 15% take rate, and that 15% has to pay for the marketing on both sides of the market.

The rate in the fee schedule is the headline take rate. The one that matters is the effective take rate: what the platform actually kept after refunds, fee waivers, promotional credits and the incentives it paid to buyers and suppliers. The two drift apart quietly, because every exception is small and each one was approved for a good reason at the time.

02

The Take rate formula and a worked example

The formula and an illustration; the corpus line is the audited figure behind it.

Take rate = marketplace revenue ÷ gross merchandise value

Worked example Illustration, not a client figure

$150,000 of fees on $1,000,000 of GMV is a 15% take rate. Refund the buyer in full while keeping the fee only on completed orders and a 12% refund rate turns 15% into 13.2%.

03

Why Take rate matters in an audit

In a marketplace audit, effective take rate is rebuilt from the transaction ledger, not read from the fee schedule. We take the fees actually retained, subtract the refunds, waivers, credits and incentives that offset them, and divide by GMV for the same period. The gap between the headline rate and the effective rate is the leak, and it is usually spread across policies nobody has reviewed since launch.

The common causes in the published cases are a refund policy that returns the fee along with the purchase, launch era fee waivers that were never switched off, supply incentives that kept paying after supply was no longer scarce, and buyer subsidies justified on repeat volume that never arrived. Each one lowers the share of GMV the platform keeps without appearing as a cost line in the marketing budget.

Take rate is also the margin every marketplace acquisition dollar has to clear. A buyer or a supplier acquired for a given cost pays back only through the fees on their future transactions, so a falling effective take rate lengthens payback across every channel at once. The marketplace cases below put an annual figure on each leak; the median highlight finding across all 74 audits is worth $58k a year.

04

Take rate in the audited cases

The marketplace cases where the fee the platform kept, or the incentives set against it, was the finding, each with the audited annual figure.

06

Questions about Take rate

What is take rate?

Take rate is the share of each transaction a marketplace keeps: its commission and fee revenue divided by the gross merchandise value that passed through it. $150,000 of fees on $1,000,000 of GMV is a 15% take rate.

What is effective take rate?

Effective take rate is what the marketplace kept after refunds, fee waivers, credits and incentives, divided by GMV. If refunds return the fee on 12% of orders, a 15% headline take rate becomes 13.2%. The effective rate is the one marketing payback depends on.

How does a marketplace lose take rate?

Through policies that each look small: refunds that return the fee, launch fee waivers left on, supplier incentives that outlive the shortage they fixed, and buyer subsidies justified on repeat volume that never comes. The audit rebuilds the effective rate from the ledger and sizes each one. Read the marketplace audit page →

Know the term. Now measure it in your own numbers.

Take rate, measured against your own accounts in 5 to 7 working days. $10k to $50k of findings, or your money back.

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Fixed fee. No retainer. NDA first.

Go deeper

Take rate and the wider audit evidence