Etsy takes its share in small slices, and each slice has its own rules. Sellers who treat the platform's fees as one vague percentage are the sellers who discover, at year's end, that the marketplace ate a fifth of their turnover. The structure below held as of 2025; marketplaces revise their terms, so treat this as the map and check Etsy's own published fee schedule before pricing your next collection.
Which fees does Etsy charge on every sale?
Four charges recur. The listing fee — $0.20, around 16p — is paid per item or quantity listed and renews after four months or on sale. The transaction fee is 6.5 per cent of the total, and it includes what the buyer pays for postage, a detail that surprises new sellers on every heavy parcel. Payment processing in the UK typically adds around 4 per cent plus 20p per order. And there is a payment account fee in some regions — small, but real — applied to each transaction.
On a £60 mug order with £5 postage, the arithmetic looks like this: roughly 16p listing, £4.23 transaction on the £65 total, and about £2.80 processing — around £7.20 in all, or just over 11 per cent before postage costs, packaging and your clay. On a £20 card it is proportionally heavier, because fixed per-order charges bite hardest on small baskets. art news coverage.
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What is Offsite Ads and why is it unavoidable?
Offsite Ads is Etsy's external advertising programme, and above a sales threshold participation is compulsory. Sellers who have made $10,000 or more in the previous twelve months pay a 12 per cent fee on orders the programme attributes to its ads; below that threshold the programme is optional and takes 15 per cent on attributed sales. The fee applies only when Etsy's systems credit the ad with the order — but sellers cannot opt out above the threshold, so mature shops must treat 12 per cent as a live cost on part of their turnover. Onsite Ads, which promote listings inside Etsy, remain optional at 12 to 15 per cent depending on settings.
How do makers price around all this?
The working methods are unglamorous. Price in whole pounds with the fee stack already absorbed, so a mug that must net £22 after fees lists at £26. Raise free-shipping thresholds to keep postage out of the transaction fee where possible. Watch the ad dashboard monthly — attributed sales are listed there — and factor them into the autumn quarter, when marketplace advertising intensifies ahead of Christmas, a season e-commerce reporting covers closely each year.
Finally, remember what the fees buy: a storefront with traffic, checkout and trust that would cost real money to rebuild alone. The healthiest shops treat Etsy as one channel among several — fairs, stockists, a simple own-website shop — so no single fee schedule ever holds the whole business hostage.
