Should you sell on Etsy, or on your own site?
Should you sell on Etsy or your own website? The fees on one $28 order compared, what Etsy gives you that a site can’t, and when running both makes sense.
Should you sell on Etsy or your own website? Start on Etsy, move the repeat buyers to your own store, and eventually run both. Etsy is a shopping center: expensive rent, but people are already walking past. Your own site is a unit on a quiet street, cheap to keep, and empty until you bring someone to it.
The number that decides when to add your own store is how many of your orders come from people who already know your name. If a third of your sales are repeat customers or people sent by Instagram, you’re paying Etsy about 12% to process orders it didn’t find for you. That’s the moment a store of your own starts paying for itself, because a store of your own takes no commission on the orders you win yourself, and that third of your sales stops handing a cut to a company that had nothing to do with the sale.
What Etsy charges on one $28 order#
Take a candle at $28 with $5.50 shipping, so an order total of $33.50. Etsy’s published US fees at the time of writing work out like this.
| Fee | Rate | On this order |
|---|---|---|
| Listing fee | $0.20 per listing, renewed on sale | $0.20 |
| Transaction fee | 6.5% of the order total including shipping | $2.18 |
| Payment processing | About 3% plus $0.25 | $1.26 |
| Total | $3.64, about 10.9% |
That’s the good version. If the buyer arrived through Offsite Ads, Etsy adds 12% or 15% of the order total depending on your annual sales, which on this order is another $4.02 to $5.03 and takes the total to about a quarter of what the customer paid. Sellers under the annual threshold can’t opt out of Offsite Ads.
What the same order costs on your own store#
On your own site you pay a card processor and a hosting bill. Stripe’s standard US rate is about 2.9% plus 30 cents, so $33.50 costs you $1.27. There’s no commission, no listing fee and no advertising levy.
| Etsy | Your own store | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost of one $33.50 order | $3.64 | $1.27 |
| What that is, as a share of the order | 12.2% | 2.3% |
| Commission taken on a sale you found yourself | 6.5%, plus the rest of the column above | None, at any sales volume |
| Cost of 60 orders a month | $218.40 | $76.20 |
| Cost of a month with no orders in it | Listing renewals only, $0.20 each | Hosting, billed monthly |
| Who finds the customer | Etsy, often | You, always |
| Who owns the customer’s email | Etsy | You |
Read the table downwards rather than across the bottom. The first four rows are the case for your own store: $2.37 of every $33.50 order stays with you, and at sixty orders a month that’s $142.20 the marketplace no longer takes out of work you did yourself. The fifth row is the case against it, and it’s a real one. Etsy costs you next to nothing in a quiet February; your own site is hosted by someone, billed monthly, in the months it sells nothing at all. That’s the trade: a fee that only appears when you make a sale, against a bill that doesn’t care, and a commission of zero percent on everything you find yourself. There’s more on the arithmetic in selling without paying commission on your own sales.
What Etsy gives you that your own site can’t#
Weigh this before you cancel anything. Etsy’s search is a genuine storefront with buyers in it, already holding a card. A new listing can sell on the day it goes up, which will never happen on a brand new website. It collects and remits the sales tax on those orders as a marketplace facilitator, handles currency, and absorbs a good deal of fraud risk. Its reviews are trusted because they are Etsy’s, not yours.
It also gives you a low risk way to test a product. If you don’t yet know whether people will pay $28 for your candle, find out on Etsy for the price of a listing instead of building a store.
What you only get on your own site#
- The customer’s email address, which is the most valuable thing in the whole transaction.
- Prices you set without one eye on what the marketplace search rewards.
- Your own name in Google, ranking for your own products.
- Shipping rules that match how you ship things.
- Bundles, discount codes and wholesale pricing.
- Nobody able to close you down on a Tuesday with an automated policy email.
That last one isn’t scaremongering. Suspensions happen, appeals are slow, and a shop with no other channel stops earning that day. A site of your own is the insurance policy as much as the saving.
Should you sell on Etsy or your own website when you’re starting out?#
Etsy, almost always. You need to learn what sells, what shipping costs, how long each item takes to make, and what a bad review feels like. Learning all of that on a website nobody has found yet takes a year. Learning it on Etsy takes a month.
The exception is if you already have an audience. A maker with four thousand engaged Instagram followers, or a farmers market booth with a regular line, is paying commission for buyers she brought herself. If that’s you, build the shop first. What that involves is in adding an online store to a site that never had one.
How to move buyers across without breaking Etsy’s rules#
You can’t ask an Etsy customer to go and buy on your own site instead, and messages that try get flagged. What you can do is put something in the package, because the package is yours.
- Print a thank you card with your own web address and a discount code. Physical inserts are allowed, unlike marketplace messages nudging buyers off site.
- Put the same address on your packaging and your labels.
- Offer something the marketplace listing doesn’t carry: a bundle, a made to order option, a subscription.
- Ask for a newsletter signup on your own site, never through Etsy’s messaging.
- Keep posting to Instagram and send that link to your shop, not to your Etsy listing. Those buyers were never Etsy’s.
- Once your shop takes a third of your orders, keep the Etsy shop and raise its prices slightly. Let the margin difference do the work.
A Falmouth candle maker, over eight months#
A candle maker was doing about 60 Etsy orders a month at an average order of $33.50, paying roughly $218 a month in fees, more in the months Offsite Ads caught a lot of orders. She launched her own store on February 14 with 22 products, three shipping bands and Stripe checkout. Today you pay $1 for the website plus your first month of hosting. After that hosting is $8.99 a month, billed on the same date each month until you cancel, and you can cancel in any month.
February gave her nine orders on the new site, all from Instagram and from cards in Etsy packages. By October it was 41 a month against 38 still coming through Etsy. Her fees that month were $138.32 on Etsy and $52.07 on her own store, on top of the hosting she pays monthly for the site itself.
She kept the Etsy shop open. It still finds people who have never heard of her, at Christmas especially, and the cost of keeping it is only the fees on the orders it brings. What changed is that she now owns 1,100 email addresses, which is what she will use in November. Getting the photographs right did most of the work on the new site, and none of it needed a camera: see product photographs you can take on a phone.
Before you open your own store, get these in place#
- Shipping bands that reflect real carrier prices, not a guess. There’s a method in setting shipping rates that don’t lose you money.
- A returns policy in writing, with the number of days a buyer has to send something back.
- Stock kept in one place, or the same item will sell twice in one afternoon.
- Your business name and a real contact address on the site. The card networks require it of merchants and buyers look for it before they type a card number.
- A plan for the first thirty orders, because a shop with no buyers is only a website.
If that list looks like two weeks of evenings, start with the website and the photographs, and add the shop to it when the first thirty orders are in sight. Nothing on this list is wasted if you do it in that order.
Questions people ask about this
What percentage does Etsy take from a sale?
Expect roughly 11% of the order total once you add the 6.5% transaction fee, payment processing of about 3% plus 25 cents, and the listing fee. If the sale came through Offsite Ads, add another 12% or 15% on top, which can take the total past a quarter of the order. Check Etsy’s current fee schedule before you budget, because the numbers are revised.
Is it cheaper to sell on my own website than on Etsy?
Per order, yes, and by a wide margin. Card processing on your own store is around 2.9% plus 30 cents, against roughly 11% on Etsy before advertising. The catch is that Etsy sends you buyers and your own site doesn’t, so the saving only appears once you have people who already know your name.
Can I sell on Etsy and my own website at the same time?
Yes, and for most makers that’s the right answer for the first year or two. Etsy finds new customers, your own store keeps the repeat ones. The thing to watch is stock, because two shops selling the same last item is the fastest way to a bad review.
Does Etsy report my sales to the IRS?
Yes. Marketplaces report what they paid you to the IRS on Form 1099-K and send you a copy. The dollar threshold that triggers one has moved several times in recent years, and several states set a lower one than the federal rule, so assume a form is coming and check the current threshold rather than a figure in an article. It creates no new tax and changes nothing if you were already declaring the income, but it does mean the numbers are visible.
While you are here
Reading about it is the slow way.
We design the website, write the words and put it online in seven days. Today you pay $1 for the website plus your first month of hosting. After that hosting is $8.99 a month, billed on the same date each month until you cancel, and you can cancel in any month. The same build is openly sold at $1,500, which is what a US agency charges for a small business site of this size. The hosting carries a mailbox, SSL, and the DNS and renewals on your own domain. Domain included on Complete, $18.99 a month. On Basic it’s billed at cost, about $12 a year. No contract and no notice period.