Etsy Fee Calculator

Etsy fees stack up in a way that catches new sellers off guard. There is the listing fee (£0.16 per item, charged when you list and again every 4 months), the transaction fee (6.5% of the total sale including shipping), payment processing (4% plus £0.20 in the UK), the regulatory operating fee for UK and EU sellers (0.3% of the sale), and offsite ads (15% of the price if Etsy advertises your listing externally and the buyer comes through that ad).

On a £25 sale with £3 shipping, the total fees come to roughly £3.32 before offsite ads, which is about 11.9% of the sale value. Add offsite ads and the figure rises to £7.07, or 25.2% of the sale. Most new sellers price using a 50% margin assumption against material cost and end up taking home far less than expected because they didn't model the fee stack.

Etsy enrolls all sellers in offsite ads automatically. If a buyer clicks an Etsy ad on Google, Facebook or Instagram and then buys your item within 30 days, you pay 15% of the full sale price (including shipping) in addition to all the other fees. Sellers under £8,000 in annual sales can opt out; sellers above that threshold cannot. The 15% fee can convert a profitable sale into a loss-making one if your margin is thin.

Whether to opt out is genuinely contested among sellers. The case for staying in: Etsy spends real money on driving traffic to your shop, and 85% of an extra sale is more than 100% of no sale. The case for opting out: many of those 'offsite' sales would have come through anyway via direct search, and you are paying 15% on traffic that may have been organic. There is no perfect answer; the calculator lets you toggle the assumption to see your shop's specific economics.

Plug yourself in. A handmade soap with £3.50 in materials and £1.20 packaging selling for £8.50 with £3 shipping looks healthy at a glance: gross profit per bar £4. After Etsy fees of around £1.30 (without offsite ads) and assuming you hit minimum wage on the time involved (10 minutes at £11.44 per hour is around £1.90), the true profit per bar is around £0.80. That is 9.4% net margin on the sale, which feels different from the 47% gross margin headline.

For Etsy sellers, the working rule is to aim for 30% net margin after all fees, materials, and a fair hourly rate for your time. Lower than that and you are running a hobby with extra steps. Use the [side-hustle-hourly-rate](/side-hustle-hourly-rate) tool to see what your real hourly figure looks like once expenses come out, which is often the sobering moment that pushes new sellers to raise their prices.