Cashowa
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Etsy publishes every one of its fees and still almost no seller can tell you their own effective rate. The fees are quoted against four different bases, and two of the biggest are the ones nobody mentions. Put in one order and see the real number.
Etsy enrols you in Offsite Ads permanently at 12%, and you cannot opt out again. Here is what that does to the order above.
Now
14.7%
£23.84 per order
Once enrolled
29.1%
£19.82 per order
Costs you
£2,013.60
a year, at this order size
At £14,000 a year you are already over the threshold, so the higher figure is the one that applies to you.
The reason Etsy's fees are hard to add up is not that there are many of them. It is that each one is charged on something different. The transaction fee counts your postage. The payment fee counts the postage and adds a fixed amount per order, so it hurts small orders far more than large ones. Offsite Ads counts the whole order. And in the UK and EU, VAT is charged on the fees themselves.
Quoted one at a time, each sounds modest. Against a single £24 order with £3.95 postage, a UK seller with no VAT number and no Offsite Ads attribution keeps £23.84 of £27.95 — an effective rate of 14.7%. If that sale came through an Offsite Ad after they crossed the threshold, they keep £19.82, and the rate is 29.1%.
$0.20 per listing, charged when you list and again every four months if it auto-renews. It is the smallest fee and the one people think about most, because it is the only one you pay before you have sold anything.
6.5% of the item price plus the postage plus gift wrap. The postage part is the detail worth knowing: if you charge £4 to post something, Etsy takes its cut of that £4 as well, even though the money goes straight to a courier.
A percentage plus a fixed amount, both set by the country your shop is registered in — 3% + $0.25 in the US, 4% + £0.20 in the UK, 4% + €0.30 in much of the EU. The fixed part is why low-value orders are so much worse than they look: 20p on a £3 sticker is 6.7% before anything else has been counted.
Charged in the UK, France, Italy, Spain and Turkey, where governments levy a digital services tax that Etsy passes on. It is a fraction of a percent, it appears on your bill without explanation, and it is in none of the popular calculators.
Etsy advertises your listings on Google, Meta and elsewhere. If a buyer arrives through one of those ads and buys within 30 days, Etsy charges 15% of the entire order, capped at $100.
Under $10,000 in sales over a rolling 12 months you can opt out. Once you pass it, you are enrolled permanently at 12% with no way back. The lower rate is presented as a benefit of growing, and for many shops it is the largest single line on the bill. It is also the change sellers are least likely to have planned for, because the threshold is a rolling window rather than a calendar year — you can cross it in a good August and not notice until September.
If you sell from the UK or EU and have not given Etsy a VAT number, Etsy adds your local VAT rate to every fee above. Not to your sale — to its own charges. A UK seller's 6.5% transaction fee is really 7.8%, and the same multiplier applies to the payment fee and to Offsite Ads.
Adding a VAT number to your Etsy account removes it. Whether you should register for VAT is a bigger question with other consequences, and worth an accountant rather than a blog post — but if you are already registered and have not given Etsy the number, you are paying a fifth more in fees than you need to.
If Etsy takes 25% and you want to keep £20, raising the price to £25 leaves you £18.75, because the fees apply to the new price too. You have to solve for it rather than add to it. The calculator above does that and tells you the price that actually leaves you what you wanted.
Where this leaves you. A calculator tells you what one order costs. What it cannot tell you is what your fees actually came to last month, because that depends on which sales were ad-attributed, what you paid for postage labels, and what your stock cost. Those numbers are in your Etsy statements and your bank account. Cashowa reads both and works it out per order.
Upload an Etsy order export and a bank statement. Cashowa works out the real margin per item, fees and postage included. Free to start.