eMAG Commissions: What Is Deducted From a Sale and Where VAT Fits In (2026)

On eMAG, “what is my commission rate?” has no one-line answer — and that is not a gap, it is how the system works. But other questions do have answers: which amount commission is charged on, where VAT fits into that calculation, what the category difference changes in practice, and where you read your own rate. This article does not hand you a rate table; it hands you the mechanism for finding your rate and putting it in the right place.

1. Which amounts make up an eMAG sale?

Three separate ones: your VAT-exclusive price, the VAT added on top of it, and the total the customer pays. This is where sellers arriving from other marketplaces get confused, because elsewhere those three amounts hide inside a single number. On eMAG they are visible separately:

• Your price (excluding VAT). The API documentation defines this field literally as “sale price without VAT”. The number you type is already your net price.
• VAT. Added on top of your price. Collected from the customer, never yours, and never part of the commission calculation.
• What the customer pays. The sum of the first two. This is the price on the listing — and it is not the figure you use for profit maths.

In Romania the standard VAT rate is 21% and the reduced rate for books is 11%. We are not printing rates for Bulgaria, Hungary or Poland here — enter your own country’s rate yourself.

The 15% in that table is an example, not eMAG’s rate. There is no such thing as a single “eMAG rate”: it varies by category. You read your own off your commission invoice — section 4 shows how, step by step.

2. Which amount is eMAG commission charged on?

On the ex-VAT price — one line: commission = ex-VAT price × rate. That is the number you typed. On Trendyol, by contrast, commission is calculated on the VAT-inclusive price the customer pays — we covered that in detail in Trendyol commission rates.

The mechanism: eMAG’s price field is defined without VAT (official API documentation, §2.4), VAT is added on top of that price and never reaches you — so the commission base is the ex-VAT number you typed. When an order is returned, the commission on that sale comes back too; commission is charged on sales that actually happened. The one variable is the rate — you read that off your commission invoice, and section 4 is the method.

At the same shelf price, the two marketplaces use different bases. On a 121 RON listing price, Trendyol logic charges on 121 and eMAG logic charges on 100. The difference looks small on one item; across hundreds of orders it shifts your pricing decisions systematically.

The arithmetic: apply Trendyol’s VAT-inclusive plane to eMAG revenue and revenue comes out roughly 17–19% too low. The wrong plane is not a rounding issue — it misstates the whole profit figure, which is why Verimle builds the entire eMAG calculation on the VAT-exclusive plane.

3. Why is there no single “eMAG commission rate”?

Because the rate is tied to the product’s category, and it can differ on campaign sales. Think of the category difference as a mechanism: eMAG places the product in a category tree, and the rate follows that placement. In practice:

1. Two different rates in one store is normal. If your catalogue spans several categories there is no single “store rate”; each product group has to be calculated separately.
2. A category change changes your pricing decision. Moving a product to another category (or eMAG moving it) also moves your floor price.
3. Campaign periods are a separate plane. The rate can differ on campaign sales, so computing campaign profitability with your normal-period rate is misleading.

This is why you should distrust any “eMAG commission is X%” claim you find online. The right question is not “what is the rate” but “what is the rate on my product” — and that figure has two official sources: your seller panel and your commission invoice.

4. How do you derive your own commission rate?

Divide the ex-VAT total on one period’s commission invoice by your ex-VAT sales revenue for the same period. The panel gives you the contractual side; the invoice gives you what was actually deducted. Comparing the two takes five minutes and most sellers never do it:

1. Pick a period (one month is enough).
2. Add up your VAT-exclusive sales revenue for that period — that is the commission base.
3. Take the VAT-exclusive total from that period’s commission invoice.
4. Divide: effective rate = commission (ex-VAT) ÷ revenue (ex-VAT).

Worked arithmetic: if you sold 10,000 RON ex-VAT in a month and your commission invoice totals 1,500 RON ex-VAT, your effective rate is 15%. If that number diverges from the rate in your panel, there are two possibilities: your category mix is blended (several rates averaged together), or a line did not behave as expected. Both are worth asking about.

5. Where does VAT enter this calculation?

In three different places: the VAT the customer pays, the VAT on the commission invoice, and the product’s own VAT rate. Most of the confusion comes from treating VAT as a single thing.

a) The VAT the customer pays

Added on top of your ex-VAT price. Collected and declared; it is not your revenue. You do not put it into your profit calculation.

b) The VAT on the commission invoice

eMAG’s commission invoice carries three fields: amount without VAT, VAT amount, and total with VAT. The figure that belongs in your profit calculation is the ex-VAT one. How the VAT on that invoice is handled depends on your tax regime — settle that with your accountant; we are not promising a rate or a rule here.

c) The product’s own VAT rate

In Romania, 21% standard and 11% for books. If your catalogue mixes rates, two products with the same shelf price have different ex-VAT prices — and therefore different commission bases.

6. Does the commission invoice break down per product?

No — what comes back is a document total, with no order or SKU breakdown. What the invoice does give is precise: eMAG’s invoice endpoint returns real invoice data — amount without VAT, VAT amount, total with VAT, and commission flagged as its own category. The breakdown is what is absent.

The practical consequence: on eMAG, per-product net profit cannot be read off the invoice; it is computed from your orders and from the commission rate you read off the invoice. That is why an eMAG profit figure is an estimate and is labelled as one. Trendyol and Amazon are different — there the settlement/event data carries an order-level breakdown, so profit comes from the real deductions.

7. What happens if you deduct commission twice?

You lose the same money twice on paper and profit erodes systematically. This is the sneakiest error: if you already deducted commission on the order line, and then also deduct the monthly commission invoice as a “deduction”, the same amount leaves the calculation twice — and you start repricing, or delisting, products that were in fact profitable.

This is not a theoretical warning: the same mistake produced a 5,127.98 RON double-count in live Trendyol data (10 August 2026), and the lesson was written into the eMAG engine from the start — the commission invoice is not counted as a separate deduction. Keep the same rule in your own spreadsheet: deduct commission in exactly one place.

8. Why is the floor-price formula different on eMAG?

Because eMAG works on a VAT-exclusive plane, so the VAT term drops out of the formula. The real test of putting commission in the right place is your floor price:

• eMAG (ex-VAT): floor = (cost + shipping + target margin) ÷ (1 − commission rate)
• Trendyol (VAT-inclusive): floor = (cost + shipping + target margin) ÷ (1 − commission rate − v ÷ (1 + v))

Worked example: cost 60 RON, shipping 15 RON, target margin 10 RON, example commission rate 15%. The eMAG formula gives floor = 85 ÷ 0.85 = 100.00 RON ex-VAT. Apply the Trendyol formula to the same product (with 21% VAT) and the floor comes out at 125.66 RON — inflated by 25 RON because you deducted a tax the price never contained. The result: you conclude you “can’t go below that price” and quietly price yourself out of the competition.

To try the numbers on your own product, use the eMAG commission calculator; country, VAT rate and commission rate are all your inputs.

9. Three frequently asked questions

Which amount is eMAG commission charged on?

On the VAT-exclusive sale price — the number you type into the panel or the API. The price field is defined without VAT in the official API documentation; VAT is added on top at checkout, never reaches you, and never enters the commission calculation. The variable is the rate itself — read yours from your own commission invoice.

Is there a single eMAG commission rate?

No. The rate varies by category and can differ on campaign sales. Read your own rate from the seller panel and from your commission invoice.

Is the VAT on the commission invoice a loss for me?

The invoice arrives with three separate fields: amount without VAT, VAT amount, total with VAT. Put the ex-VAT amount into your profit calculation, and confirm the accounting treatment of that VAT with your accountant.

10. Where does Verimle sit in this calculation?

Once you connect your eMAG account, Verimle reads your orders and commission invoices, computes the floor price on the VAT-exclusive plane, and does margin-protected repricing — the target price never goes below your floor. On the Buy Button side it measures your rank, the winning price and the number of offers, and you can follow that measurement in the panel.

The scope is equally clear: you follow the button state in the panel, while the alert that fires the moment you lose it is built for Trendyol and Amazon. On eMAG the profit figure is an estimate and is shown with an “estimated” label: because the commission invoice returns a document total with no SKU breakdown, profit is computed from your orders as rate × revenue. Deduction disputes do not exist on eMAG — the eMAG API has no endpoint for filing one, invoices are read-only. (Trendyol does have that feature, and even there it does not recover the money — it detects the issue and prepares a dispute draft.) We give no payout terms or return-cost figures in this article either: both vary with your contract and your category — read them from your own seller agreement and invoices.

Next: the price plane, the buy button and the mandatory price band in our eMAG selling guide; the logic of running channels side by side in the multi-marketplace strategy article; and the integration itself on the eMAG integration page. For the official source, see the eMAG Marketplace seller centre.