Sell a $20 template on Etsy and you don't keep $20. For a US seller using the payment-processing rates below, you keep about $17.65 before any other applicable fees or taxes.
Here's where the rest goes:
$0.20 — listing fee. Etsy charges this when you publish a listing, and it can charge another $0.20 when a listing renews or when additional quantities are sold, depending on how the listing is set up.
6.5% — transaction fee, on the total order amount, including shipping and gift wrapping where applicable.
3% + $0.25 — payment processing for US sellers using Etsy Payments.
≈ $2.35 on a $20 sale. Roughly 11.75%, before any other applicable fees.
Most sellers know roughly what that comes to. Fewer know about the one that arrives later.
The fee that turns up when things start going well
Offsite Ads. Etsy advertises your listings on Google, Facebook, Pinterest and elsewhere, and when one of those ads leads to a sale, Etsy takes a cut on top of the fees above.
If your shop has made less than $10,000 in sales over any consecutive 365-day period, Offsite Ads are optional and you can opt out. Once your shop reaches $10,000, Etsy says participation becomes mandatory for the lifetime of the shop. The rate also drops from 15% to 12% on orders attributed to an Offsite Ad.
Read that again, because it's the part that can sting: the mandatory version kicks in because your shop did well. The fee is lower once you cross the threshold, but you no longer get to opt out.
You can argue that's fair enough. Etsy brought you a buyer who might never have found you otherwise. That's worth paying for.
But there's a second cost on every sale, it isn't on any invoice, and nobody sends you a bill for it.
You don't find out who bought from you
Etsy takes the payment and keeps the customer relationship largely inside Etsy.
You get an order. You don't get a direct marketing relationship with that buyer that you can simply take with you. Etsy does not give you the buyer's personal email address for your own marketing, and using buyer information for unsolicited marketing isn't allowed.
Which means when you finish your next product, there's no customer list you can simply email to tell them about it.
You list it, and you go back to the start: hoping Etsy search shows it to strangers, paying the same fees again to reach people who already bought from you once and might have bought again if they'd known it existed.
This is one reason some shops hit a ceiling. The shop gets bigger. The audience you can reach directly doesn't necessarily grow with it — because there isn't one. There's a series of customers you've reached through Etsy, and once the sale is over, the relationship still lives primarily on Etsy.
The bit that should annoy you
Here's the thing most sellers haven't stopped to notice.
You're probably already driving your own traffic. Making pins. Posting on Instagram. Telling people about your shop. That's your work, on your time, using an audience you've built yourself.
And every one of those people lands on an Etsy listing — where Etsy takes its transaction and processing fees and, on an attributed Offsite Ad sale, potentially another advertising fee.
Etsy didn't find that buyer. You did. Etsy just happened to own the page they landed on.
When Etsy search brings someone to your shop, the fee is earned, fair and square. When you bring them, Etsy still takes its cut of a customer it didn't find.
If most of your own traffic comes from Pinterest, it's worth reading how to sell digital products on Pinterest without opening a shop alongside this — same traffic, different destination.
So point your own traffic somewhere you own
Not instead of Etsy. Etsy is genuinely good at putting your work in front of people who have never heard of you, and nothing here replaces that. Leave the shop exactly as it is.
The change is only about the traffic you generate. Same pins, same posts, same effort — a different link.
Instead of your listing, that link goes to a page of your own with three things on it:
Something free worth having. A sample pack, a starter template, a printable — enough that handing over an email address feels like a fair trade.
A box to type an email into. They get the free thing automatically, straight away, without you doing anything.
A way to buy. Your own checkout, on your own page, where the sale is yours.
Now the same visitor who would have gone straight to an Etsy listing has the option to join your email list. When your next product is ready, you can tell them directly. That message doesn't depend on Etsy showing your listing to anybody.
One sale on Etsy is one sale. One email address is every launch you do after that.
If you've never built a list before, this walks through starting one from zero followers, including what to put on the page and what to send first.
What that costs to set up
Less than most people assume, because you don't need four separate tools for it.
Disclosure: the systeme.io links below are affiliate links. If you sign up through one of them, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
The page, the email box, the automatic delivery of the free thing, the list itself and the checkout are all in systeme.io, and the free plan does all of it. No card, no trial running down, no upgrade needed before it works.
That's the whole build: one page, one free download, one email list, one checkout. An afternoon, once.
The honest part
Your own page will not beat Etsy at bringing you strangers. It won't bring you anyone at all until you point something at it.
It also converts worse than an Etsy listing, and there's a good reason for that. Someone browsing Etsy already has their card out and already trusts the checkout. Someone landing on a page they've never seen before doesn't. Expect fewer sales per visitor at the start.
That's exactly why the free download matters more than the checkout at first. Plenty of people won't buy today who will happily take something free — and once you have the email address, today stops being the only chance you get.
This is slow. It's a second thing running quietly alongside a shop that already works, and it compounds instead of resetting. Six months of it and you have a list of people who like your work and can be reached without paying Etsy to put your next product in front of them.
Six months without it and you have exactly what you have now: a shop where the customer relationship still largely lives on Etsy.
Where to start
If you want the whole thing laid out step by step, I've put the setup into a free 30-page guide — building the page, connecting the email list, getting the free download to send itself, and taking a payment. 41 screenshots, no cost.
Or skip it and start the free account and work it out as you go. It's a page and an email box. It isn't complicated.
Keep the shop. Keep the Etsy sales. Just stop letting the customers you found yourself vanish the moment the sale ends.
Related reading: cheaper email marketing for Etsy sellers and creators · what you actually need to run an online business