Take rate is the percentage a marketplace, platform or payment business keeps from each transaction it intermediates: platform revenue divided by gross merchandise value (GMV). If buyers and sellers exchange $10M through the platform and the platform books $800k, the take rate is 8%. It is the single number that converts a marketplace’s impressive-sounding GMV into actual revenue, which is why investors read GMV and take rate together, never separately.
Take rates vary structurally, not arbitrarily: payment processors run at fractions of a percent on enormous volume; app stores historically commanded 15–30%; services marketplaces sit anywhere between 10% and 25% depending on how much of the workflow they own. The strategic tension is permanent — raising the take rate lifts revenue but invites disintermediation (users settling off-platform) and competitive undercutting. Mature platforms therefore grow monetisation by layering services (ads, financing, logistics, SaaS tools) rather than raising the headline commission.
Legal and accounting edges
Two professional questions hide inside the metric. First, revenue recognition: whether the platform is agent (recognising only its commission as revenue) or principal (recognising the full transaction value) determines reported revenue by an order of magnitude, and diligence teams re-derive the take rate to test which presentation the company has used. Second, the contract and tax stack: the take rate is legally a fee defined in the platform’s user agreements, with VAT/withholding treatment that depends on who is supplying what to whom — and in Türkiye, e-commerce intermediaries face sector-specific obligations (ETBİS registration, e-commerce law commission transparency rules) that make the fee structure a compliance artefact, not just a pricing choice.
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