Take Rate

The percentage of gross merchandise value (GMV) that a marketplace or platform captures as its own revenue — the central metric for understanding how much economic value a two-sided market extracts from the transactions it facilitates.

Tanay Jaipuria has written extensively on take rates: a 2021 tweet charted take rates across public platforms with transparent pricing, and a subsequent post framed the framework for how marketplaces determine what take rate they can set and sustain. The analysis spans the full range from platforms like Etsy and Shopify to other public Marketplace Businesses, making it a benchmark reference for comparing how different platforms price access to their ecosystems.

The structural question is not just what the take rate is today, but the conditions under which a platform can raise it, hold it, or is forced to lower it — which is ultimately a question about substitutability, lock-in, and the balance of power between the platform and its participants.

Where this appears

• Take Rates Across Different Platforms… (tweet)
• [[[new Post] I Wrote About… (tweet)]]