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Etsy is one of the best online marketplaces for your small business. It has a global presence, brings its own customers, and does all of the work of hosting your shop so you can focus on selling. Whether you’re considering opening a shop or have been selling on Etsy for a while, it is important to have a full understanding of the fees and costs of selling on Etsy so that you can be profitable.
If you haven’t opened your Etsy shop yet, you can sign up here and get 40 free listings. Just pay the small one-time start-up fee and open your shop without any additional charges until you make your first sale.
**IMPORTANT UPDATE: This post has been updated to reflect new Etsy fees and rate increases. (January 2025)
Summary of Etsy Fees
We’ll go into more detail about each of these fees below, but to give you an overall idea of the costs, here is a summary:
- One-time shop set-up fee
- Listing Fee: $0.20 USD
- Transaction Fee: 6.5%
- Regulatory Fee: 1.15% (NEW as of August 2024 for Canadian sellers)
- Payment Processing Fee: 3% + $0.25 CAD (Canadian rate – varies by country)
- Off-site Ads: 15% (optional for new sellers) / 12% (mandatory for larger sellers)
- Etsy Ads: optional, set your own budget
Looking for a way to quickly and easily determine the fees for your latest Etsy order? Be sure to download your free Etsy Fee Calculator at the bottom of this post!
Shop Set-Up Fee
New in 2024, Etsy has started charging some new shops a one-time set-up fee of $15 USD to open their shop. This fee is non-refundable and Etsy will let you know when you begin setting up your shop if this fee will apply to you. It seems that Etsy is working towards charging this to every new shop. It is a very low investment to opening up your own online retail store and you only have to pay this fee once.
Etsy Listing Fees
When you set up your Etsy shop, you will add individual listings for each product that you sell. Etsy will charge you $0.20 USD (United States Dollars) for each product that you list. If your shop currency is CAD (Canadian Dollars), the exact amount will vary depending on the currency exchange rate. It will only vary by a few cents so let’s just use $0.27 CAD for our calculations.
This listing fee will expire after four months if the product doesn’t sell in that time. You can choose whether you want Etsy to automatically renew your listing or you can do it manually. If you select manual, you’ll have to keep an eye on your expiry dates and renew any listings before/after they expire.
If you sell the product and have more than one available, you will get charged to relist the product after the sale. This relisting fee is the same $0.20 USD as the initial listing fee and also lasts 4 months or until the product sells again. Even if one customer buys more than one of your item, you will be charged the relisting fee for the 2nd item, 3rd item, etc.
Other than the new start-up fee above, the listing fees are the only ones that you have to pay upfront. This means that the cost to open your Etsy shop will be very low, AND if you use this link to sign up, you’ll get your first 40 listings for free!
Etsy Transaction Fees
Think of the transaction fees as Etsy’s commission on your sale. Their cut for giving you a platform for selling your products and sending you traffic. Rather than charging you a monthly or yearly fee, they charge a commission rate on each sale. This can be very beneficial, especially for a new shop, as you don’t get charged anything until you make a sale.
The transaction fee is 6.5% of the sale price, before taxes*. This includes all of the following:
- selling price of all items in the order
- shipping price
- any gift wrapping fees that the customer opted to pay
*For sellers in countries other than USA or Canada, the fee will apply to the sales tax as well. (Update: Since Etsy has taken away the tool for GST/HST registered Canadian sellers to properly add sales tax to their sale price at checkout, the transaction fee is charged on top of your listed sale price which includes GST/HST (& QST if applicable). But the transaction fee is not charged on top of any PST that Etsy charges or American sales tax.)
Regulatory Operating Fees
This is a new fee charged to sellers in certain countries only to account for additional costs Etsy incurs to do business in those countries. As of August 2024, this is a new fee for Canadian sellers at a rate of 1.15%. This is charged the same was as the transaction fee above, on the sale price (before tax) including shipping and any gift wrap charges.
(American sellers are not currently charged this fee. Find out if your country is charged this fee here.)
Payment Processing Fees
The next fee to understand is the payment processing fee. Where the transaction fee was Etsy’s “cut” of your sale, the payment processing fee is the cost of “processing” your customer’s credit card payment. They are taking the funds from your customer’s credit card and transferring them to your payment account. You pay a small fee for them to do this.
Any payment processor that you use for credit card payments will charge a similar rate (Paypal, Square, etc.). Etsy’s exact rate will vary depending on your shop’s country and possibly your customer’s country.
For Canadian sellers, the payment processing fee is $0.25 CAD + 3% for all orders to Canada or USA. International orders to other countries have a fee of $0.25 CAD + 4%.
American sellers have a payment processing fee of $0.25 USD + 3% for all orders, domestic or international.
The fee percentage is applied to the total price of the transaction, including tax. This includes all of the following:
- selling price of all items in the order
- shipping price
- any gift wrapping fees that the customer opted to pay
- sales tax
Offsite Ads
These fees are a bit more difficult to understand and account for as an expense.
What are Offsite Ads?
These are advertisements that Etsy runs on your behalf on other websites: Google, Pinterest, Facebook, etc. If you are enrolled in the Offsite Ad Program, you won’t pay any fees unless you make a sale.
If you are a new or low volume seller, you can choose whether or not to enroll in the Offsite Ad Program. You can find this option under Settings > Offsite Ads. The offsite ad fee will be 15% of the total sale price of any order you receive through these advertisements. This is in addition to all of the other Etsy fees mentioned above.
If you are a more established shop and you’ve made at least $10,000 USD in sales (not profit) over the past 12 months, you will be automatically enrolled in the Offsite Ad Program. You cannot opt out, but you get a lower fee of 12%. Even if your sales drop, you will continue to be enrolled at the 12% rate for the lifetime of your shop.
The fee percentage is applied to the price of the transaction, before taxes*. This includes all of the following:
- selling price of all items in the order
- shipping price
- any gift wrapping fees that the customer opted to pay
*See note above under Transaction Fees for more details about how this fee is charged related to sales tax.
How do Offsite Ads work?
Say Etsy runs an ad on Facebook featuring a product listing from your shop. When a shopper clicks on this ad, they will be taken to your Etsy shop to complete the purchase. When they place an order, you will be charged the Offsite Ad fee (12-15%) on this sale. How does Etsy know if the sale came through this ad?
Offsite Ads use “cookies” to track visits. You may be familiar with this term, but what does it really mean? A cookie is a small piece of data that is stored on your device when you visit a website that uses cookies. If you visit that website again, the website knows you’ve been there before and can tailor things to you (such as which ads to show you), save the items in your shopping cart, and so on.
The amount of time a website will remember these cookies varies. For Offsite Ads, Etsy tracks the cookies for 30 days from when the shopper clicks on the ad. This means that even if the customer doesn’t buy anything from your shop immediately, but returns to your Etsy shop to make a purchase anytime in the next 30 days, Etsy will “remember” that this shopper came from an Offsite Ad and you will be charged those fees for the sale. Even if the item they purchase from your shop is not the original item that was advertised to them, you will still pay the fees as the ad brought them to your shop. Further, if the customer makes a second purchase from your shop within 30 days of clicking on your Offsite Ad, Etsy will charge the Offsite Ad fees on that purchase as well.
However, if a shopper clicks on an Offsite Ad for a different shop and ends up purchasing from your shop within 30 days, you won’t be charged any additional fees. Only for shoppers who clicked on links for your shop.
How to Account for Offsite Ad Fees
The Offsite Ad fees are the hardest to add into your pricing as they aren’t charged on every sale and they’re the most expensive fee. You may not be able to add an extra 12-15% on top of your sale price to cover these extra fees. So what should you do?
First of all, keep in mind the reason for these fees is because Etsy brought you this sale. Without the Offsite Ad (in most cases), you wouldn’t have made the sale at all. So even if your profit is 12% less than what you normally make, you would have made $0 without this sale.
The best way to offset these additional fees is to track your sales over time. See how many offsite sales you made vs. regular Etsy sales. Factor that into your price increase. So say you made 100 sales and 5 of these were from Offsite Ads. That is only 5% of your orders. On those 5 sales, you paid an extra 12% in fees. 12% fees on 5% of your orders is only 0.6%. So to keep your profit the same, you only need to increase your prices by 0.6%. Keep an eye on your sales and adjust your prices further if you see you’re getting a lot of Offsite Ad sales.
Etsy Ads
We just discussed OffSite Ads, which are advertisements Etsy runs on your behalf on other websites such as Google, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.
Etsy Ads are advertisements which you can set up to run directly on Etsy. These are also referred to as Promoted Listings and they are completely optional. Promoted listings are displayed at the top of search results so buyers are more likely to see your listing when shopping.
When you set up an ad campaign on Etsy, you choose which listings you want to promote and what your daily budget is. You can turn them on or off at any time. The minimum budget is $1/day and the max is $50 (USD). You pay per ad click – so anytime a potential customer clicks on your promoted listing, you are charged. (This is different than the Offsite Ad fees as you only pay for those if it results in a sale.) Once you’ve used up your daily budget, your listings will no longer be promoted that day.
The money you spend on Etsy Ads are not directly linked to a sale (and could even result in no sales at all). Because of this, it is difficult to incorporate these costs into your sale prices. It is better to set up a marketing budget for yourself based on your sales or revenue. Decide how much you want to spend on marketing and set that money aside. Monitor your ad stats to see if they are bringing you any sales; adjust accordingly.
Overview of all Etsy Fees
We’ve gone over each fee individually and seen how it applies to our example sale. Let’s take a look at the total fee breakdown.
For a regular sale through Etsy, the total fees for this order would be $10.09. If we take this as a percentage of the order subtotal, it works out to about 12.5%. If we remove these fees from the sale, the revenue is $69.91*. This is the amount Etsy will pay you for the sale. This is the most common type of sale you’ll receive and therefore gives you the best idea of the fees for a typical sale.
If this sale came through Offsite Ads and your shop rate is 15%, the total fees would be $22.09. That works out to 27.5% of the order subtotal. You will receive $57.91.
If this sale came through Offsite Ads and your shop rate is 12%, the total fees would be $19.69. That works out to 24.5% of the order subtotal. The payout from Etsy would be $60.31.
*Any sales tax charged by Etsy is collected and remitted by them, so they won’t pay you this amount. It is just used in some of the fee calculations.
I hope this has helped give you a better understanding of the costs associated with opening an Etsy shop. If you are prepared for the fees, you can better price your items to allow for a sustainable profit.
Sales Tax Charged on Etsy Fees
This is a new topic I have added to the updated version of this post. With changing Canadian regulations, Etsy has changed many aspects of how they handle sales tax for Canadian sellers, both charged to the customers and charged to the shops. Without going on a rant about that in this post, I want to at least mention that sales tax will be charged on some or all of your Etsy fees.
If you are registered to charge GST/HST, Etsy will charge you GST/HST on all of your Etsy seller fees.
If you are not registered to charge GST/HST, Etsy will not charge you GST/HST on the payment processing fee & transaction fee IF the buyer was charged GST/HST on the sale. Etsy will charge you GST/HST on all other seller fees.
For QST, the same rules apply as with GST/HST being charged above (i.e. if you are registered to charge QST, Etsy will charge you QST on all seller fees. If you’re not registered, they won’t charge you QST on the payment processing & transaction fees if the buyer was charged QST on the sale.)
If your shop is in British Columbia, you will be charged PST on all Etsy seller fees.
If your shop is in Manitoba or Saskatchewan, you won’t be charged PST on any Etsy seller fees.
ETSY FEE CALCULATOR
Looking for an easy way to find out the Etsy fees for your order? Get your free Etsy calculator by filling out the form below:
Let me know in the comments below whether you found this post helpful in understanding Etsy fees. I hope it helps you set your pricing in a way that is profitable to your small business. As always, if you have any questions, I’m happy to help!
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