Ask what Etsy charges and you will be told 6.5%. That number is real, it is just not the number that decides whether your shop makes money. The transaction fee is one line on a receipt with five or six lines, and the largest one does not appear on most orders at all, which is exactly why it catches people out.
Every fee that can land on a single order
- Listing fee: $0.20 per listing, which expires after four months and renews automatically when the item sells.
- Transaction fee: 6.5% of the item price plus what you charge for shipping and gift wrapping. Shipping is included, which surprises people who price postage at cost.
- Payment processing: a percentage plus a flat amount, and it varies by country. Around 3% plus $0.25 in the US, closer to 4% plus a fixed amount across the UK and EU.
- Regulatory operating fee: a small percentage charged in certain countries only, typically a fraction of a percent.
- Currency conversion: 2.5% if you list in a different currency from your payment account.
- Offsite Ads: 15% or 12%, and this is the one that changes the whole picture.
The fee that is not really optional
Offsite Ads charges you when a buyer arrives through an advert Etsy placed elsewhere, on Google, social platforms and similar. If your shop has made under $10,000 in the last 365 days, the rate is 15% and you are allowed to opt out. Once you cross $10,000 in trailing-year sales, the rate drops to 12% and you are enrolled permanently, for the lifetime of the shop, with no opt-out available. There is a cap of $100 per order.
Read that again, because the shape of it is counterintuitive. Growing past $10,000 lowers your Offsite Ads rate and simultaneously removes your ability to say no. People hear about the threshold and assume their fees went up. The rate went down. The choice disappeared. Those are not the same thing, and only one of them shows up in a fee table.
What that does to a real order
Take a $30 item, no separate shipping charge, sold from a US shop. On an ordinary order the fees come to roughly $3.30, which is about 11% of the sale. Change one thing, that the buyer clicked an offsite advert, and the same order costs about $7.80 in fees, which is 26%. Same product, same price, same buyer paying the same amount. More than double the cost to you.
Neither number is your true rate, because Etsy only charges the ads fee on ads-attributed orders. If a fifth of your orders arrive that way, your blended take is around 14%. That blend is the number worth pricing against, and it is the number almost nobody calculates.
Work out your own blended take rate, free →How much Etsy takes at different price points
These assume a US shop, no separate shipping charge, and the standard 3% plus $0.25 processing. The first percentage is an ordinary order, the second is the same order arriving through an Offsite Ad at the 15% rate.
- $10 sale: $1.40 in fees, so 14.0%. Through Offsite Ads, $2.90, so 29.0%.
- $25 sale: $2.83 in fees, so 11.3%. Through Offsite Ads, $6.58, so 26.3%.
- $50 sale: $5.20 in fees, so 10.4%. Through Offsite Ads, $12.70, so 25.4%.
- $100 sale: $9.95 in fees, so 9.9%. Through Offsite Ads, $24.95, so 24.9%.
Two patterns are worth reading off that list. The percentage falls as the price rises, because the $0.20 listing fee and the flat processing charge stop mattering, which is why very cheap items are punished hardest. And the gap between the two columns never closes, because the ads fee is a straight percentage. On a $10 item, an offsite order costs you more than double an ordinary one.
Questions sellers actually ask
Does Etsy take a cut of shipping? Yes. The 6.5% transaction fee is calculated on the item price plus what you charge for shipping and gift wrapping, so pricing postage at cost does not protect it.
Can I avoid the Offsite Ads fee? Only if your shop has made under $10,000 in the last 365 days, in which case you can opt out in your settings. Past that figure, enrolment is permanent and there is no opt-out. The fee is capped at $100 per order.
Why was I charged 15% when I read the rate is 12%? The 12% rate belongs to shops at $10,000 or more in trailing-year sales. Smaller shops that stay opted in pay 15%. The bigger shop pays the lower rate.
Is Etsy Ads the same thing? No. Etsy Ads are the onsite ads you set a daily budget for, and you pay for them whether or not they lead to a sale. Offsite Ads are placed by Etsy on external platforms and charged as a percentage only when they produce a sale. They are billed separately and can both apply.
Why this changes how you price
If you set prices assuming 6.5%, every offsite order quietly eats the margin you thought you had, and you will not notice until a payout looks wrong. Price against your blended rate instead. The practical version: work out what share of your orders came through Offsite Ads over the last few months, use that to calculate your real average take, and treat that as the cost of selling on the platform.
The same logic applies to discounts. A coupon does not just cost you its face value, it also shrinks the revenue that all those percentage fees are calculated against while leaving your fixed costs untouched. A sale that looked marginally profitable at full price can become a loss at 20% off.
The smaller leaks worth knowing about
- Shipping counts toward the transaction fee, so charging postage separately does not shield it from fees.
- Listing fees renew on every sale, so a low-priced, high-volume item pays $0.20 far more often than you might picture.
- Currency conversion at 2.5% is easy to forget if your listings and your bank account are in different currencies.
- Etsy Ads, the onsite ones you set a budget for, are entirely separate from Offsite Ads and come out on top of everything above.
- Refunds happen, and Etsy can issue them without consulting you, so a small refund reserve built into your pricing is a cost of doing business rather than pessimism.
None of this is an argument against selling on Etsy. It is an argument for knowing the real number, because a shop priced against 6.5% and a shop priced against its actual blended rate look identical from the outside and end the year in very different places.
See what Etsy really takes from your sale →