Guides · Pricing

What Etsy fees really cost you (and how to price around them)

Most sellers price by gut and hope there's profit left. But Etsy collects at several points in a single sale, and the fees stack. Here's every fee, what it costs on a typical $34.50 order, and how to set a price that actually pays you.

Every fee, one at a time

On a $28.00 mug with $6.50 shipping — a $34.50order — the platform takes the following before you’ve paid for a single thing you made:

FeeRateOn $34.50

Listing fee$0.20 flat$0.20

Transaction fee6.5% of order$2.24

Payment processing3% + $0.25$1.29

Offsite Ads (if applicable)15% of order$5.18

Fees without ads$3.73

The one that catches people out

The transaction fee applies to the whole order— the item price plus the shipping you charge, plus gift wrap if you offer it. That trips up sellers who set shipping “at cost” and assume it passes through untouched. It doesn’t. Charge $6.50 for shipping and Etsy takes $0.62 of it before the parcel exists.

Free shipping doesn’t dodge this either. If you raise the item price to absorb postage, the fee follows the higher price. There is no arrangement in which shipping escapes the 6.5%; you can only decide who feels it.

A worked example

Say that mug costs you $7.20 in materials, $8.40 to pack and post, and you value your making time at $6.00. Here’s the whole picture:

Revenue$34.50

− Etsy fees−$3.73

− Your costs−$21.60

Profit$9.17

That’s a 26.6% true margin — healthy for handmade. Turn Offsite Ads on and the same sale drops to about $3.99, an 11.6% margin. Same product, very different month.

What is not a per-sale fee

Etsy Plusis a flat monthly subscription. It doesn’t change your per-order maths, so it isn’t in this calculator — treat it as overhead and divide it across your monthly orders.
Etsy Ads (the on-site ones) is a budget you set, not a percentage skimmed from an order. If you run them, your real acquisition cost is total ad spend divided by orders, added on top of what you see here.
Currency conversionapplies when your listing currency differs from your payment account currency. If that’s you, shave a little off every margin below.

Offsite Ads is capped. Etsy won’t charge more than $100.00 of Offsite Ads fee on a single order. On a $34.50 sale that cap is irrelevant, but if you sell $900.00 furniture it matters a great deal — the calculator above applies it.

How to use the numbers

Put your own figures in the calculator at the top of this page. The break-even item price it shows is the number worth writing down: below it, every sale of that product costs you money, no matter how many you sell. Volume never fixes a negative margin — it just gets you there faster.

Nothing you type is sent anywhere. The maths runs in your browser, which is why there is no signup and no “connect your shop” step.