Selling on Etsy (or any marketplace) is a great way to reach buyers, but the sticker price and what lands in your account are two different numbers. Between listing, transaction, payment processing, and optional ad fees, a chunk of every sale goes back to the platform. If you price as though you keep the full amount, your real margin is thinner than you think.
Where the money goes
Marketplace fees usually come in a few layers: a small listing fee, a percentage transaction fee on the sale, a payment-processing fee (a percentage plus a flat amount), and, if you opt in, advertising or offsite-ads fees. None is huge alone; together they add up to a meaningful slice of each order.
Figure out what you actually keep
- Start with the sale price (including any shipping the buyer pays).
- Subtract the platform's transaction and payment fees.
- Subtract your product's true cost (materials, labor, overhead).
- Subtract your actual shipping and packaging cost.
- What's left is your real profit on that sale.
Revenue is what the customer pays. Profit is what survives the fees, the materials, and your time.
Price with fees in mind
Once you know the fee bite, build it into your pricing so the platform's cut comes out of margin you planned for, not out of your own pay. The same product can need a different price on a high-fee marketplace than on your own site, and that's fine: each channel should clear its own costs.
Know it per sale
Tracking fees by hand across dozens of orders is miserable, so most makers just don't, and lose sight of their real margin. Keepsel keeps a true cost for every product, and from the Maker plan you can enter each sales channel's fees, so the margin you see is closer to what you actually keep. Try the free Etsy fee calculator on a single sale first.