eMAG Marketplace or your own store
On eMAG you pay a known commission and get traffic that already exists. On your own store you pay no commission, but you pay to bring people in — and that's the cost nobody can guarantee you up front. That's the whole difference. If you sell a niche product people search for by name, your own store wins. If you sell something searched for generically and compared on price, eMAG brings you buyers you would never have found. Almost every serious Romanian seller does both, and they're right.
What you pay on eMAG, exactly
Commission 7–25% of net value, by category. eMAG does not publish a per-category grid — you see it in the contract, before signing. Romania's 21% VAT is added on top of the commission, not included in it. Source: eMAG Marketplace Infocenter, “Taxes and commissions”.
Zero sign-up fee, zero monthly subscription, zero listing fee, zero account management fee. That is a real difference from Amazon, where the Professional plan costs €39 a month whether you sell anything or not. Source: eMAG Marketplace seller FAQ.
Genius contribution: 3–8 RON per order, by order value, when delivery goes to an easybox for a Genius subscriber. The grid took effect on 1 January 2026. On a 75 RON order, those 8 RON are another 10.7% on top of commission — and that's where the margin on cheap products breaks. Source: eMAG Marketplace Infocenter, official grid.
Payouts arrive twice a month, with commission deducted at source. eMAG publishes no day-count SLA. Source: eMAG Marketplace Infocenter.
What you pay on your own store
The platform. Gomag starts at €7/month, but the price covers an average of 350 orders a month and every additional 350-order block costs another €67. A shop doing 1,400 orders a month on the Advanced plan pays €238, not €37. Source: gomag.ro/preturi, September 2026. WooCommerce is free as a licence; you pay for hosting, plugins and development time.
Payment processing. Through PayU, or Netopia and EuPlătesc — real rates are negotiated and differ by processor. What sources agree on: EU-issued cards cost roughly 1.0–1.8% plus a fixed 0.5–1 RON, and non-EU cards roughly double that, 2.5–2.9%. Above 50,000 RON a month, rates become negotiable. Romanian comparison sites disagree with each other on the exact figures; get a quote and use your own.
Delivery. FAN Courier list prices for a sub-1 kg parcel are 25–30 RON; on a contract you pay noticeably less, but no Romanian courier publishes contract rates. Source for list prices: infocontact.ro, March 2026.
Customer acquisition cost. The line that decides everything, and the only one nobody can estimate for you. There is no credible public benchmark for the Romanian market by vertical. Anyone who gives you a number here is inventing it.
When each one wins
eMAG wins when your product is searched for generically, when you compete on price and availability, when you want volume fast without a marketing budget, and when you don't yet have a brand anyone searches for by name.
Your own store wins when people search for your brand, when the margin is high enough that a 15–25% commission would kill it, when you want your customers' data, when you sell subscriptions or repeat purchases, and when you're building something you might sell one day — a store with its own customers sells; a marketplace account doesn't.
Both is the answer for most people. The marketplace brings volume and validates your products; your own store keeps the margin and the returning customers. The risk is selling cheaper on the marketplace than on your own site and cannibalising your own orders — that's fixed with pricing rules, not with hope.
Obligations that apply either way
Wherever you sell: 21% VAT since 1 August 2025, single reduced rate 11%. e-Factura has been mandatory for B2C since 1 January 2025, and from 1 January 2026 the submission deadline is 5 working days, not calendar days — a change many guides still have wrong. Fines run from 1,000 to 10,000 RON per untransmitted invoice, by taxpayer size. Source: OUG 89/2025.
On your own store you also carry an obligation the marketplace handles for you: since 19 June 2026, OUG 18/2026 requires a digital withdrawal button, permanently visible, with a simplified online form and automatic email confirmation. A PDF-only procedure is no longer compliant. Fines 5,000–15,000 RON. We wrote about it separately.
In short
eMAG's commission is a known cost. Acquisition cost on your own store is not. That doesn't make the marketplace cheaper — it makes it more predictable, and predictability is worth something when you don't yet have money to lose on marketing experiments.
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