Commission is charged on the tag
The sentence that causes the trouble is "the shop takes forty per cent". Forty per cent of what is the whole question, and the answer is always the tag, never the profit and never the margin. An item that cost you $45 on a $180 tag at a 40 per cent split does not lose $72 of profit — it loses $72 of gross, out of which the $45 still has to come.
The consequence shows up in the line about raising the tag. At a 40 per cent split, putting one more dollar in your pocket means adding $1.67 to the ticket, of which the shop side keeps 67 cents. There is no version of this where a cost is passed on cleanly, because the shop is charging on the larger number you just created.
The comparison is not shop against no shop
The reason people consign anything is that the tag in the shop is usually higher than the price the same item fetches in a private sale, and the shop absorbs the parts of the job you would otherwise do — the photographs, the questions, the no-shows, the packing. So the comparison the page runs is not a percentage against zero. It is a whole route against a whole route, with your time priced on the side you actually spend it.
On the defaults, a $180 tag at a 40 per cent split against a $145 private sale with fees, shipping and three quarters of an hour of your time is much closer than either side expects. Move the private price, the shipping or your hourly figure and it flips, which is the point of having all three as fields.
Reading a contract before the arithmetic
Two terms change the numbers more than the headline percentage. The first is which side of the split card processing lands on, which is why there is a selector rather than an assumption. The second is anything charged per item regardless of whether it sells, which turns a percentage arrangement into a partly fixed one and hurts most on cheap pieces.
Other terms do not appear on this page at all and still matter: how long the shop holds an item before it marks it down, whether it can mark it down without asking, what happens to unsold goods, who carries the loss on theft or damage, and when you are paid. Those are contract questions and they are read, not calculated.
Related pages
The margin calculator covers the margin-against-markup confusion that sits underneath most split arguments. Online store profit is the detailed version of the sell-it-yourself column, including who pays the shipping. Booth rent against commission is the same shape of question for renting space rather than consigning goods, and hourly value is where the rate for your own time comes from.
Questions people ask
What split should I expect?
This page has no view on that and neither should any calculator. Splits differ by shop, by category, by price band, by how long the item has been on the floor and by what you negotiated, and plenty of contracts change the percentage partway through a holding period. Read the figure off your own contract and put it in the field. The table at the bottom exists so you can see what a different split would have done to the same item, which is useful preparation for a conversation and useless as a benchmark.
Why does adding money to the tag not cover my costs?
Because the commission is charged on the tag, so anything you add to the tag is also commissioned. At a 40 per cent split you keep 60 cents of each dollar added, which means covering a $12 outlay requires putting $20 on the ticket. The page prints the multiplier for your own split. It also means the buyer has to accept a higher price for the manoeuvre to work at all, and if they do not, you have not covered the cost, you have just stopped selling the item.
Which side pays the card processing?
Whichever side your contract says, which is why the page asks rather than assuming. Some shops absorb it out of their commission, some pass it through to the consignor, and a few do not mention it until the statement arrives. The difference on a $180 tag at three per cent is small; across a season of consigning it is not, and it is the sort of term that is easy to agree to without reading because the headline percentage sounded fine.
Should I include my own time on the consignment side too?
There is some — the cleaning, the trip, the paperwork — and the page has a field for it labelled as cleaning, repair and getting it to the shop. Put your travel and handling time in there priced at your own rate if you want a strict comparison. What is deliberately absent from the consignment side is the listing, answering and packing time, because that is precisely the work the shop is doing in exchange for the split, and counting it on both sides would make the comparison meaningless.
What happens to items that do not sell?
That is a contract term rather than a calculation, and it is the one most worth reading before you sign. Contracts differ on how long an item stays, who may reduce the price and by how much, whether unsold goods return to you or become the property of the shop, who carries a loss if something is stolen or damaged on the floor, and how quickly you are paid after a sale. None of that is arithmetic and none of it is on this page. Ask before the rail, not after.