Four fees stacked, not one
Etsy never quotes a single percentage because it charges four things on a typical sale. The listing fee: $0.20 per item, per four months or per sale. The transaction fee: 6.5% of the order — and unlike eBay’s category tiers, this hits everything, including the shipping you charge. Payment processing: 3% plus $0.25 in the US. And Offsite Ads: when a buyer clicks an Etsy-placed external ad and buys within 30 days, you owe 15% of that order (mandatory 12% if your shop crossed $10,000 in trailing-twelve-month sales — the rate drops but participation stops being optional). Stack them on the calculator’s default $35 order plus $5 shipping: $0.20 + $2.60 + $0.55 = $3.35 on-platform, 8.3% of revenue — before Offsite Ads can multiply it.
The Offsite Ads cliff is the real pricing risk
A 15% Offsite Ads attribution doubles an 8.3% fee load to 23.3% — on the default order, fees jump from $3.35 to $6.95, and a $12-cost item’s profit drops from $24 to $20. Sellers discover this in the fee invoice, not the listing editor, because attribution is invisible at sale time: the buyer clicked an ad, Etsy says, pay up. Two mitigations run the numbers here. Price as if every sale were attributed (the reverse field with “Yes” selected does exactly that), so an attributed sale is planned and a normal one is a bonus. And watch the $10,000 threshold from both sides: below it, Offsite Ads participation is optional — decline it if your margin structure cannot carry 15%; above it, the 12% is law, and pricing must absorb it in every listing.
Shipping is a fee surface too
The 6.5% transaction fee and 3% + 25¢ processing both apply to shipping you charge — a $5 shipping line costs $0.48 in fees on top of the label you buy. Sellers who “offer free shipping and raise prices” are not avoiding this; they are choosing which line carries it. The honest math runs through the calculator either way: a $40 item with free shipping and a $5.50 baked-in label pays $3.15 of fees, while $35 + $5 shipping pays $3.35 minus whatever the label actually costs you. If your real label is $4.50, free-shipping-at-$40 nets $0.35 more than itemized — that is the entire decision, and it flips with every product’s weight class. Run both configurations per product, not per shop.
A worked example: the $35 + $5 order
Item $35, shipping charged $5, item cost $12, label $4.50, normal on-platform sale. Revenue: $40. Listing $0.20, transaction $2.60, processing $1.45 ($1.20 + $0.25) — total fees $4.25, an effective 10.6% of revenue. Costs: $16.50. Net profit: $19.25 — a 48% margin, healthy for handmade. Flip to an Offsite Ads sale: the 15% line adds $6.00, fees hit $10.25 (25.6% effective), net falls to $13.25. Same listing, same buyer-side experience, 31% less money — which is why the calculator makes the Offsite toggle a first-class input instead of a footnote. Your Etsy prices should be set so that the attributed case is still a business.
Where Etsy sits among 2026 platforms
Etsy’s ~8-10% on-platform load sits between eBay’s 13.6% and Mercari/Depop’s 0%-commission structures — but Etsy brings buyers you cannot source yourself, which is what the fee actually buys. The strategic comparison resellers should run is cost-per-acquired-customer, not fee percentage: a 0%-fee platform with zero organic discovery costs you the marketing budget Etsy charges for. Where Etsy uniquely stings is volume sellers past $10,000 — the mandatory 12% Offsite Ads makes its effective take closer to eBay’s than its sticker suggests. Run your actual monthly mix through the calculators on this site before concluding any platform is “expensive”; the number that matters is fees divided by the revenue that channel actually produces.
Last verified October 11, 2026. Platform fees change — always confirm against the platform’s official fee page before pricing decisions. Estimates for planning only; every calculation runs in your browser and nothing is stored.