How to price art across marketplaces (Artsy, MercadoLibre, eBay)
A painting has one value. It does not have one price. The number a collector sees on Artsy, on MercadoLibre, and on your own website should almost never be identical — and if it is, you are probably losing money on at least one of them.
This is the part of selling across channels that quietly eats margins. Each marketplace has its own currency, its own taxes, its own buyer expectations, and its own way of taking a cut. Below is how the economics actually differ, and how to keep them straight without a spreadsheet per platform.
Start from one gallery price
Pick a single reference price for each work, in the currency you think in. For a gallery in Mexico that is usually MXN; for a dealer in Madrid, EUR. This is the number that reflects the work's value, your margin, and the artist's split. Every channel price is derived from it — never entered independently. The moment you start typing prices straight into three different dashboards, they drift, and drift is where the losses hide.
Artsy: priced in USD, read by collectors
Artsy is an international collector audience and the convention is USD. Two things matter here. First, the conversion: a price set once in MXN has to track the exchange rate, or your USD number slowly becomes wrong. Second, presentation — collectors on Artsy expect clean, rounded, confident numbers. A work that is 4,980 USD reads as a markdown; 5,000 USD reads as a price. Round deliberately.
MercadoLibre: local price, with tax and shipping baked in
MercadoLibre is a domestic retail context, and the buyer expects the listed price to be the price they pay. That means IVA (VAT) and shipping are not afterthoughts — they belong inside the number. A work that nets you a given amount has to be grossed up for tax, the platform's commission tier, and the cost of getting it to the buyer's door. Forget one of those and the sale is real but the margin is not.
eBay: think in net, not list
eBay's fees come off the top, so the useful way to think about an eBay price is backwards: decide what you need to net, then add the final-value fee and any promoted-listing cost to reach the list price. Pricing eBay like Artsy — a clean collector number — quietly hands the platform a slice you never accounted for.
Your own website: the cleanest margin
Selling from your own site means no marketplace commission, just payment processing. This is usually your best margin, which is why it is worth setting up even if it is not where most volume comes from. The price here can be closest to the true gallery price, because the least is being skimmed on the way through.
Set the margin once; compute the rest
The principle that keeps all of this sane: you should edit one thing — your margin or the gallery price — and have every channel's number recompute. Artsy converts and rounds. MercadoLibre grosses up for tax, fees, and shipping. eBay works back from a target net. Your website applies processing only. Change your margin next quarter and all four move together, instead of you re-pricing a thousand works by hand across four tabs.
This is exactly the math Percalo does for you. You set a gallery price; the formulas per channel — which are yours to edit — produce the right number for each marketplace, taxes and fees included. When the exchange rate moves or a platform changes its commission, you adjust the formula, not the catalog.
One value. The right price everywhere. Computed, not retyped.