How to Price Your Etsy Products
The standard pricing formula — materials, labour, overhead, profit — works fine until you sell on Etsy. Then a chunk of every sale disappears into fees that most sellers fold into a vague “expenses” line and badly underestimate.
Etsy takes roughly 9 to 11% of a typical order before any advertising, and up to a quarter of it with. This is what those fees actually are, and how to price so they come out of Etsy’s share rather than yours.
If you need the underlying formula first, our guide to pricing for wholesale and retail covers breakeven, markup and margin. This picks up from there.
What Etsy charges
- Listing fee — $0.20 per listing. Charged when you list, and again every four months if it renews, or when it sells. One fee covers the whole quantity on a multi-quantity listing.
- Transaction fee — 6.5%. The one that catches people: it applies to the total the customer pays, including any shipping and gift wrap you charge. Not just the item price.
- Payment processing — around 3% + $0.25 per order in the US. Rates vary by country. Charged per order, not per item.
- Offsite Ads — 12% or 15% of the order value when a sale comes from one. Under $10,000 in annual sales the rate is 15% and you can opt out; above $10,000 it drops to 12% and becomes mandatory.
Fee schedules change and vary by market — check Etsy’s current fee page for your country before you commit to a price list.
What that costs on a real sale
An item at $40 with $6 shipping charged to the customer — $46 total:
| Listing fee | $0.20 |
| Transaction fee — 6.5% of $46 | $2.99 |
| Payment processing — 3% of $46 + $0.25 | $1.63 |
| Total fees | $4.82 — about 10.5% |
| If it came from an Offsite Ad (15%) | +$6.90 |
| Total with ad | $11.72 — about 25.5% |
Note the transaction fee is calculated on $46, not $40. Charging shipping separately does not shelter it — you pay 6.5% on the postage as well.
Pricing so the fees are covered
Work out your breakeven the normal way — materials, labour including your own time, and overhead. Then treat Etsy’s cut as a cost of sale rather than something you absorb.
The rough approach: divide your target take-home by roughly 0.89 to cover the standard fees, or by about 0.75 if a meaningful share of your sales come through Offsite Ads. If you need $40 in hand, that is a listing price nearer $45 in the first case and $53 in the second.
Whether the market bears that is a separate question — and if it does not, the answer is to reduce cost or reconsider the channel, not to quietly eat the fee.
Three things that catch sellers out
Free shipping is not free. Rolling postage into the item price means the 6.5% applies to it either way — but you also lose the ability to show a lower headline price. Model both before deciding.
Costing your own labour at zero. The most common error on any handmade platform. A shop looks profitable right up until the point you try to pay someone else to make the work.
Crossing the $10,000 threshold. Offsite Ads become mandatory at that point, at 12%. If your margins only work because you opted out, growing past that line quietly changes your economics.
Where your price should sit
Too low reads as cheap and invites buyers to question the quality. Too high without justification and they compare you to a mass-produced alternative and leave.
If you price above comparable shops, the listing has to carry the reason — the material, the process, the time, the fact that it is made by one person rather than a factory. That belongs in the description, not in the buyer’s imagination. Our guide to writing product descriptions covers how to make the specifics do that work.
If you also sell wholesale
Plenty of Etsy sellers get approached by shops. Your Etsy price is a retail price, and a wholesale price is roughly half of it — which only works if your breakeven leaves room. If it does not, wholesale will lose you money on every unit.
Check the numbers before saying yes: how to sell your products wholesale covers what stockists expect, and our free price list template gives you somewhere to set out wholesale and retail side by side.
Fee figures are US rates, accurate as of August 2026. Etsy’s fees vary by country and change periodically — confirm current rates on Etsy’s own fee page before pricing.