Marketplace Fee & Profit Calculator

Three Etsy orders, worked out line by line

US seller, Etsy's published fees as of July 2026. Every figure below is what the calculator above prints if you type in the same numbers.

A percentage is easy to nod along to and hard to feel. Six and a half per cent sounds like rounding error until you watch it land on a real order next to a listing fee, a payment processor, and sometimes an advertising cut you did not choose. So rather than describe the fees, here are three orders carried all the way down to the money in your bank account. The Etsy rates used are the current US ones: a $0.20 listing fee, a 6.5% transaction fee, and Etsy Payments processing of 3% plus $0.25 per order. Fees change — this is where they stood in July 2026.

Order one: a $28 item with $6 shipping

A ceramic mug listed at $28, with $6 charged for shipping. It costs $9.00 in clay, glaze and firing, and $7.40 to actually get the box to the buyer — so the shipping you charge is $1.40 short of what shipping costs you before Etsy takes anything.

Revenue is $34.00, Etsy's cut is $3.68, your own costs are $16.40, and $13.92 is what is left — a 40.9% margin. Notice that the transaction fee was charged on $34.00, not on $28.00. That single detail is worth $0.39 here, and it is the thing sellers most often get wrong when they estimate fees in their head. Notice too that the listing fee is a flat $0.20 whether the item sells for $28 or $280; on a cheap item it is a meaningful slice, and on an expensive one it disappears into the noise.

Order two: a $12 sticker with free shipping

The same arithmetic on a small order, where the fixed fees stop being background noise. A die-cut vinyl sticker at $12 with free shipping: $0.85 of vinyl and cutting, $1.90 for a rigid mailer and postage. With free shipping there is no separate shipping line on the revenue side, so revenue is simply the $12 sale price.

$1.59 of fees on a $12 order is 13.3% of revenue, against 10.8% on the $34 order — same percentages, different weight, because $0.45 of that total ($0.20 listing plus $0.25 processing) is fixed no matter how small the order is. This is also where multi-quantity listings bite: Etsy charges $0.20 to publish the listing and another $0.20 for each additional unit sold on the same order, so a buyer taking five stickers costs you $1.00 in listing fees rather than $0.20. The calculator models a single unit, so add $0.20 per extra unit yourself when you are pricing a bundle.

Order three: a $48 order that arrived through Offsite Ads

A $42 print with $6 shipping, $14.00 of paper, ink and packaging, $7.85 of postage — and a buyer who clicked an Etsy advert on Google before they arrived. That last fact adds a 15% line that has nothing to do with anything you did on the day.

The identical order without an ad attached nets $21.14 at a 44.0% margin. The advert costs $7.20, which is a third of the profit. At the discounted 12% rate the same order nets $15.38 and a 32.0% margin. Whether that trade is worth it depends on whether the buyer would have found you anyway — a question nobody can answer from the order screen, which is exactly why Offsite Ads is the most argued-about line on an Etsy invoice.

The same mug at three prices

Costs held constant at $9.00 of materials and $7.40 of postage, with $6.00 charged for shipping in every row. Fees rise with price, but they rise more slowly than revenue does, so margin climbs faster than the sticker price suggests.

Twenty dollars of extra price turns into $18.10 of extra profit, because Etsy only takes 9.5% of each additional dollar plus nothing fixed. Read that the other way round and it is the more useful lesson: a $10 discount does not cost you $10, it costs you $9.05, and a race to the bottom on price is almost entirely paid for out of your own margin rather than Etsy's. If you sell print-on-demand, the "your costs" column is your provider's base cost rather than materials, and the POD profit calculator is the better place to build it up.

The minimum-price panel in the tool runs this in reverse. With the same $9.00 and $7.40 of costs and $6.00 of shipping charged, asking for a 30% margin returns $21.85 — the lowest item price at which, after every fee above, 30 cents of each revenue dollar is still yours.

The fee nobody expects: shipping is inside the transaction fee

Etsy's fee policy says the transaction fee is "6.5% of the price you display for each listing plus the amount you charge for shipping and gift wrapping." The second half of that sentence is the part that catches people. Shipping is not a pass-through that you collect on the carrier's behalf; as far as the fee schedule is concerned it is revenue, and it is taxed at the same 6.5% as the item.

On the $34 mug order that is $0.39 of transaction fee charged on the $6 of shipping, plus another $0.18 of payment processing on the same $6 — $0.57 gone before a carrier has been paid a cent. It is not a large number on one order. It is a large number across a year, and it is the reason under-charging for shipping quietly costs more than it looks like it does: you are paying a percentage for the privilege of collecting money you are about to hand to the post office.

Free shipping does not dodge it either. Folding $6 of postage into the item price moves the same $6 from one revenue line to another, and the 6.5% follows it across. There is no fee-efficient place to put shipping — the only question is which presentation converts better. The two fees do differ in one respect worth knowing: for US sellers the transaction fee is not charged on sales tax, while Etsy Payments processing is calculated on the order total including both shipping and sales tax. Different bases, same order.

What is not in this calculator's US defaults is the Regulatory Operating Fee, which Etsy charges only in a specific list of countries — the UK, France, Italy, India, Spain, Türkiye, Vietnam and Canada — and not in the US. There is also a one-time shop set-up fee in the current policy whose amount Etsy describes only as varying by location, so no figure for it appears anywhere on this page. If you are selling from outside the US, set the region above and confirm the current rate on Etsy's own fee page rather than trusting any third-party number, including ours.

The Offsite Ads threshold is a door that only opens one way

Offsite Ads is the fee people discover after the fact. Etsy advertises listings on search engines and social platforms, and if a buyer clicks one of those adverts and then places an order within 30 days, Etsy bills you a percentage of that order. The rate is 15% for most shops and 12% for high-volume ones, and it is capped at $100 per order — so on a $2,000 commission the fee stops climbing at $100 rather than reaching $300.

The threshold that separates the two rates is $10,000 in sales over the previous 365 days, and this is where the asymmetry lives. Below $10,000 you pay the higher 15% rate but you are allowed to switch Offsite Ads off entirely. Once your shop has crossed $10,000 in any rolling 365-day window, two things happen at once: your rate drops to 12%, and participation becomes mandatory for the lifetime of the shop. It does not reverse. A quiet year afterwards puts your revenue back under $10,000 but leaves the obligation exactly where it was — the discount is permanent and so is the enrolment.

That makes the threshold worth thinking about before you reach it rather than after. A shop approaching $10,000 is deciding, whether it realises it or not, that every future order attributed to an Etsy advert will carry a 12% charge forever. For most shops at that size the discount is genuinely worth more than the opt-out, because the ads do bring traffic. The point is simply that it is a one-way door, and the time to price it into your margins is before you walk through it — as of July 2026, when these terms were last checked.

Two honest caveats about how the calculator handles this. It applies whatever ad rate you set to every sale, whereas Offsite Ads only bills the orders it can attribute to an ad click — so the figure it shows is the cost of an order that came through an advert, not your blended average. And it does not model the $100 cap, which only matters above roughly $667 of order value at 15%. For a realistic picture of a whole shop, run one order with the ad rate on and one with it off, then weight them by the share of your orders Etsy actually attributes.

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