The reason most people start thinking about alternatives to Etsy isn't that Etsy is bad at what it does. It's that what Etsy does — running a marketplace with its own rules, its own fee structure, and its own relationship with your customers — becomes a constraint at some point for some sellers. Understanding exactly what you're trading when you sell through a marketplace versus a direct platform is the decision, and everything else follows from it.
What a marketplace gives you and what it costs
A marketplace like Etsy provides something genuinely valuable: buyers who are already there, already searching, already in a purchasing mindset. For a brand-new seller with no existing audience, that's significant. You don't have to build traffic from scratch.
The costs, beyond the fees, are less obvious. You don't own the customer relationship — the marketplace does. You're selling within someone else's rules, which can change. Your shop can be suspended for policy violations with limited recourse. Your listings compete directly against thousands of others selling the same thing, often on price. And the fee stack across listing fees, transaction percentages, payment processing, and potential advertising contributions adds up more than any single number suggests — it's worth calculating what you actually keep from a typical sale rather than looking at any one figure in isolation.
None of that means marketplaces are wrong for every seller. For some products and some stages of a business, they make complete sense. But knowing what you're paying — in fees and in control — is the starting point for deciding whether alternatives are worth exploring.
Other marketplaces worth knowing about
If the traffic and discoverability of a marketplace are what you need but Etsy specifically isn't working, there are others:
- Creative Market — focused on design assets: fonts, templates, graphics, Procreate brushes, UI kits. A curated marketplace with an approval process, which keeps quality higher than open platforms. Their revenue share is substantial, so check current rates before listing.
- Design Bundles / TheHungryJPEG — similar to Creative Market in focus, often used for craft and design files. Bundle promotions can drive volume.
- Teachers Pay Teachers — purpose-built for educational resources. If your product is curriculum-facing, this is a specific and active buyer community. Commission rates apply; check their current structure.
- Itch.io — primarily games and game assets, but also used for zines, tabletop resources, and other niche creative products. Unusually, the seller can set their own revenue split with the platform.
The pattern across all of these is the same: you get discovery in exchange for fees, rules, and limited customer ownership. The specifics differ; the fundamental trade-off doesn't.
Direct platforms: you bring the traffic, you keep the relationship
The alternative to a marketplace is a platform that gives you a storefront and handles the checkout and delivery, but doesn't provide buyers — you have to bring those yourself. The upside is lower fees, ownership of the customer email, and freedom from marketplace rules. The honest downside is that this only works if you have a way to drive traffic, whether that's Pinterest, social media, a blog, an email list, or some other channel.
The main options in this space:
- Payhip — free to start, taking a percentage per sale on the free plan with paid tiers that reduce it. Handles EU and UK VAT automatically, supports digital downloads, courses, memberships, and physical products. A straightforward storefront with a built-in affiliate program so others can promote your products for a commission you set.
- Gumroad — one of the original creator platforms. Currently charges a flat percentage per sale, higher than some alternatives. Well-known enough that some buyers recognise the checkout. Better suited to creators with an existing audience who want simplicity.
- Ko-fi — free to start, with a paid tier that removes transaction fees entirely. Strong in the art and illustration community. The free tier takes a percentage on shop sales; the Gold subscription removes it. Current pricing worth confirming directly.
- Sellfy — subscription-based with no transaction fees on any plan. Makes more sense once you're selling consistently enough that the monthly fee costs less than a percentage would. Has a print-on-demand option if you sell physical products alongside digital ones.
- Your own website — complete control, no platform fees beyond payment processing, you own everything. The additional complexity of building and maintaining it is the real cost, not the software. Reasonable to reach for once a business is established; harder to justify as a starting point.
The hybrid most sellers end up using
Running a marketplace listing and a direct storefront simultaneously isn't contradictory. Marketplace listings provide discovery and new buyers; a direct storefront serves returning customers, newsletter subscribers, and anyone arriving from your own channels at a lower fee rate. Some sellers use the marketplace for visibility and funnel buyers toward their own store for future purchases. Whether that approach works depends entirely on how actively you communicate with buyers after the first sale.
Disclosure: this page includes a referral link to Payhip. If you sign up through it, I may earn a small commission — there's no extra cost to you, and Payhip's free plan doesn't cost anything to join.
For most people starting a direct storefront for the first time, Payhip is a reasonable default — free to join, no monthly fee while you find out whether a product sells, automated delivery, and VAT handling built in. The percentage-per-sale model on the free plan means your costs are proportional to your revenue rather than fixed, which removes the pressure of justifying a subscription before you've made a single sale. Once volume grows enough that a paid tier makes financial sense, that calculation is straightforward to do: compare what you'd pay in fees against what the plan costs, and switch when the numbers favour it.