Etsy's fees look small one line at a time. A twenty-cent listing here, a few percent there. Stacked onto a single order they add up to roughly an eighth of everything a customer pays you — and if the sale came through Offsite Ads, closer to a quarter.
This post does the arithmetic at three realistic price points, then works out where moving to your own store actually starts paying for itself. You can run your own numbers in the free Etsy Fee Calculator as you read.
What Etsy charges a US seller
Four fees, in the order Etsy applies them:
| Fee | Rate | Applies to |
|---|---|---|
| Listing fee | $0.20 | Each listing, renewed every 4 months or after each sale |
| Transaction fee | 6.5% | Item price plus the shipping you charge |
| Payment processing | 3% + $0.25 | The full order total |
| Offsite Ads | 12% or 15% | Only orders that came from an Etsy-placed external ad |
The detail that catches most sellers out is that the transaction fee applies to shipping. Free shipping doesn't avoid it — it just moves the same money into the item price, where Etsy taxes it at the same rate.
Offsite Ads is the other trap. It's optional until your shop passes $10,000 in a rolling 365 days, at which point participation becomes mandatory and the rate drops from 15% to 12%. You cannot opt out above that threshold.
The math at three price points
Assume a physical product, $5 shipping charged and $5 shipping paid, no Offsite Ads.
A $15 item
- Order total: $20.00
- Listing $0.20 + transaction $1.30 + processing $0.85 = $2.35 in Etsy fees (11.8%)
A $30 item
- Order total: $35.00
- Listing $0.20 + transaction $2.28 + processing $1.30 = $3.78 in Etsy fees (10.8%)
A $75 item
- Order total: $80.00
- Listing $0.20 + transaction $5.20 + processing $2.65 = $8.05 in Etsy fees (10.1%)
The percentage barely moves. The fixed fees make small orders slightly worse, but from about $20 upward Etsy takes a fairly flat 10–11% of everything the customer pays.
Now add Offsite Ads at 15% on that $30 order: fees go from $3.78 to $9.03, or 25.8% of the order. On a product with a 3x markup, that single fee is most of your profit.
The same order on your own store
On Shopify Basic you pay Shopify Payments at 2.9% + $0.30. There is no listing fee and no transaction fee.
That $30 item with $5 shipping:
- Order total: $35.00
- Processing: 2.9% × $35 + $0.30 = $1.32 (3.8%)
You keep $2.46 more per order than on Etsy — and $7.71 more than on an Etsy order that came through Offsite Ads.
Run the same product through the Profit Margin Calculator with your real cost of goods to see what the difference does to your margin.
Start selling today
Start with a free trial, then $1/month for your first 3 months. No developer required.
Where the switch actually pays for itself
Shopify isn't free. Basic is $29/month, and that subscription is the honest counterweight to the per-order savings.
At roughly 7% saved per order, on a $35 average order value you save about $2.46 each time. Divide $29 by $2.46 and you get 12 orders a month — about $415 in sales — as the break-even point. Below that, Etsy is the cheaper place to be. Above it, every additional order widens the gap.
But there is a second cost that doesn't appear on any invoice: traffic. Etsy's fee is partly a marketing fee. It puts your listing in front of buyers who were already shopping. On your own store, that job is yours — through search, social, email, or ads you pay for directly. Sellers who move too early usually discover their fees dropped and their sales dropped further.
The honest framing isn't Etsy or Shopify. It's:
- Etsy for discovery — new customers who found you while browsing
- Your own store for everything after that — repeat buyers, bundles, email lists, wholesale
The one thing to do before either
Whichever way you go, own the name. An Etsy shop URL is rented; a domain is yours, and it's what lets you move a customer base from one platform to another without starting over.
Check your shop name as a domain and across every social platform in one pass on Namecheckly, then register the .com on Namecheap before you build anything on it. It costs about the price of one Etsy order and it's the only part of the setup you can't redo later.
When you're ready to run the store yourself, Shopify starts at $1/month for the first period, which is long enough to test whether your own traffic can carry the sales Etsy was carrying for you.
Next Step
Put your own numbers in the Etsy Fee Calculator — sale price, cost of goods, shipping both ways — and see what Etsy takes from a real order of yours. Then check whether the name you'd want on your own store is still free.
